N. A. BERDYAEV (BERDIAEV)
The Worth of Christianity and
the Unworthiness of Christians
I
Boccaccio tells the story of a Jew whose Christian friend was trying
to convert him. The Jew was on the point of agreeing, but before committing
himself definitely he decided to go to Rome and see for himself in
what manner the Pope and his cardinals lived, since they were the
men at the head of the Church. This frightened the Christian, who
thought that all his efforts would go for nothing and his friend certainly
refuse baptism when he had seen the scandals of Rome. The Jew duly
went there and observed the hypocrisy, depravity, corruption, and
greed which were rife among the Roman clergy and in the papal court
at that time, and on his return his Christian friend asked anxiously
what impression had been made on him. The reply was as deeply understanding
as it was unexpected: "Since all the wickedness and abominations that
I have seen in Rome have been unable to overturn the Christian religion,
since in spite of them all it continues to grow stronger, it must
be the true faith." And the Jew became a Christian.
Whatever Boccaccio's idea may have been, this tale shows
us the only way of vindicating Christianity. Christians themselves
are the greatest objection to their religion; they are a scandal
to those who are favourably disposed towards it. This argument has
been grievously abused in our day. The present weakness of faith
and spread of complete unbelief lead men to judge Christianity by
Christians; formerly it was judged in the first place by its eternal
truth, its doctrinal and moral teaching. Our age is too preoccupied
with man and what is human, so that Christianity is not seen behind
its mask of bad Christians; notice is taken of their wrongdoing
and their deformations of the faith rather than of the religion
itself; their excesses are more easily seen than the great Christian
truth. Very many people to-day estimate the Christian religion by
those whose profession of it is exterior and degenerate: Christianity
is the religion of love and of freedom, but it is judged according
to the hostility and hate and acts of violence of so many Christians,
men who compromise their faith and are a stumbling-block to the
weak.
We are often told that the representatives of other religions,
Buddhists, Mohammedans, Jews, are better than Christians in that
they are more faithful to their religious precepts; unbelievers,
atheists, and materialists are pointed out who are more worthy of
respect, more unworldly in their lives, more capable of sacrifice
than are many Christians. But the whole of the unworthiness of these
numerous Christians resides exactly in that they do not fulfil their
religion, but rather alter and pervert it. They are judged by their
inability to raise themselves to the heights of that which they
profess. But how then can the shortcomings of Christians he imputed
to Christianity when the reproach levelled at them is precisely
that they are out of accord with the grandeur of their faith? These
charges are clearly contradictory. If the followers of other religions
are often more observant of them than Christians are of theirs,
it is because these religions are more within the reach of man than
are the heights of Christianity. It is indeed much more easy to
be a good Mohammedan than a good Christian. The religion of love
is not less exalted or less true because its realization in life
is an exceedingly difficult task. It is not Christ's fault that
his truth is not fulfilled and that his commandments are spurned.
Believing and practicing Jews are always ready to tell us
that the law of their religion has the great advantage of being
practicable; Judaism is more adapted to human nature and to the
ends of human life and calls for less renunciation. Christianity,
on the other hand, is the most difficult religion to put into practice,
the most trying to human nature, requiring painful self-sacrifice
at every turn; Jews look on it as an idealistic dream, useless in
practical life and for that reason harmful. We too often measure
the moral value of men by their religion and ideals. If a materialist
is good according to his light, devoted to his idea and ready to
make certain sacrifices for it, then we are impressed by his greatness
of soul and cite him as an example. But it is infinitely harder
for a Christian to keep abreast of his ideal, for it means that
he has got to love his enemies, carry his cross bravely, and resist
the temptations of the world unflinchingly -- things which neither
the Jew nor the Mohammedan nor the materialist is called on to do.
Christianity takes us along the line of greatest resistance, the
Christian life is a crucifixion of self.
II
It is often claimed that Christianity has failed, that it has not
been historically realized, and thence another argument is drawn:
Not only Christians but the very history of their Church testifies
against it. It must be recognized that the reading of ecclesiastical
history can be an occasion of scandal to those whose faith is unsteady.
These books tell us of the conflict within the Christian world, of
human passions and temporal interests, of the corruption and disfigurement
of truth in the consciousness of sinful mankind; very often they show
periods of church-history which remarkably resemble those of civil
governments, with their diplomatic relations, wars, and so on.
The outward history of the Church is visible and can be set
out so that it is accessible to all. But her inward and spiritual
history, the turning of men to God, the development of holiness,
cannot be seen so easily; it is more difficult to write about them
because they are in a way obscured and sometimes even overwhelmed
by exterior history. Men detect evil more easily than good, they
are more conscious of the outer than of the inner aspect of life;
we have no difficulty in learning about the externals of our fellows,
their commercial undertakings, their politics, their domestic and
social institutions. But do we think much about the way in which
men pray to God, how they relate their inner life to the divine
world, in what manner they war spiritually with temptation?
Very often we know nothing, do not even suspect the existence,
of a spiritual side to those whom we meet -- at the most we are
conscious of it only in those whom we know particularly well. We
are quick to note the exterior manifestations of evil passions that
anyone can see, but as for what lies behind them, the spiritual
struggles, the reachings out to God, the toilsome endeavours to
live the truth of Christ -- we do not know them, we may even not
want to know them. We are told not to judge our neighbour, but we
judge him continually, by his outward actions, by the expression
of his face, without ever looking within.
It is just the same with the history of Christianity. It
cannot be judged by external facts, by the human passions and human
sins that disfigure its image. We have got to recall to our minds
what Christian people have had to contend with in the course of
ages and their bitter struggles to get the better of "the old man,"
of their ancestral heathenism, of their age-long barbarity, of their
grosser instincts; Christianity has had to work its way through
the matter which put up such a solid resistance to the spirit of
Christ, it has had to raise up to a religion of love those whose
appetites were all for violence and cruelty. Christianity is here
to heal the sick not the whole, to call sinners not the righteous,
and mankind, converted to Christianity, is sick and sinful. It is
not the business of the Church of Christ to organize the external
part of life, to overcome evil by material force; she looks for
an inner and spiritual rebirth from the reciprocal action of human
freedom and divine grace. It is an essential quality of Christianity
that it cannot get rid of self-will, the evil in human nature, for
it recognizes and respects the freedom of man.
Materialistic socialists are given to proclaiming that Christianity
is not a success, that it has not made the kingdom of God actual;
it is nearly two thousand years since the Redeemer of the world
appeared on earth and evil still exists, it even increases: the
world is saturated with suffering and the burdens of life are no
less for all that our salvation has been accomplished. These socialists
promise to do, without God and without Christ, what Christ himself
could not bring about: the brotherhood of man, justice in social
life, peace, the kingdom of God on earth -- these unbelievers willingly
use that expression, "the kingdom of God on earth"!
The only experience that we have of materialistic Socialism
in practice is the Russian experiment, and that has not given the
expected results. But there is no solution of the question in it.
Socialism's promise to make justice rule on earth and to get rid
of evil and suffering does not rest on human freedom but on the
violation of it; its ends are to be realized by an enforced social
organization which shall make external evil impossible by compelling
men to virtue, righteousness, and justice -- and it is this constraint
that constitutes the great difference between Socialism and Christianity.
The so-called "failure of Christianity in history" is a failure
dependent upon human freedom, upon resistance springing from our
Christ-given freedom, upon opposition by the ill will which religion
will not compel to be good. Christian truth supposes freedom,
and looks to an interior and spiritual victory over evil. Exteriorly
the State can set a limit to the manifestations of wickedness and
it is its duty to do so, but evil and sin will not be overcome in
that way. There is no such dilemma for the socialist, because he
knows no problem of sin or of the spiritual life; the only question
facing him is that of suffering and social injustice and their elimination
by means of an organization of life from without. God does not use
force, for he desires man's freedom and not merely an exterior triumph
of righteousness. In that sense it may be said that he maintains
evil and uses it for good ends. In particular, the righteousness
of Christ cannot be actualized by force. But the justice of Communism
is to be attained by compulsion, and this can be done the more easily
because any freedom of spirit is denied.
The argument based on a historical defeat of Christianity
cannot be sustained. The kingdom of God cannot be imposed; if it
is to be brought about we must be born again, and that supposes
complete freedom of spirit. Christianity is the religion of the
Cross, and it sees a meaning in suffering. Christ asks us to take
up our own cross and carry it, to shoulder the load of a sinful
world. In Christian consciousness the notion of attaining happiness,
justice, and the kingdom of God on earth without cross or suffering
is a huge lie: it is the temptation that Christ rejected in the
wilderness when he was shown the kingdoms of the world and invited
to fall down and worship. Christianity does not promise its own
necessary realization and victory here below; Christ even questioned
whether he will find any faith on earth when he comes again at the
end of time, and foretold that love itself will have grown cold.
Tolstoy believed that Christ's commands could be easily fulfilled
simply by recognizing their truth. But that was a mistake of his
over-rationalizing consciousness; the mysteries of freedom and of
grace were beyond him, his optimism contradicted the tragic depths
of life. "The good which I will I do not," says the apostle Paul,
"but the evil which I will not, that I do. Now if I do that which
I will not it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in
me." This testimony of one of the greatest of all Christians unveils
the innermost part of the human heart, and it teaches us that the
"failure of Christianity" is a human failure and not a divine defeat.
III
In the course of history there has been a triple betrayal of Christianity
by Christendom. Christians first of all deformed their religion, then
separated themselves from it, and finally -- and this was the worst
wrong of all -- began to blame it for the evils which they had themselves
created. When Christianity is adversely criticized it is the sins
and vices of Christian men and women that are criticized, their non-application
and perversion of Christ's truth, and it is to a great extent because
of these human perversions, sins, and wickednesses that the world
abandons the faith.
Man perverts Christianity in some respect and then turns
upon both the perversion and the real thing; the matters of which
the detractors of Christianity complain cannot be found in the words
of Christ, in his precepts, in the holy Scriptures, in sacred Tradition,
in the Church's teaching, or in the lives of the saints. An ideal
principle must be opposed by another, an actual fact must be met
with another actual fact. It is possible to defend the cause of
Communism by showing that it has been perverted and never properly
applied, just as can be done for Christianity. Communists shed blood
and denaturalize truth to gain their ends just as Christians have
done, but to assimilate the two systems one to the other in consequence
of this would be an obvious fallacy.
In the gospels, in the words of Christ, in the teaching of
the Church, in the example of the saints, and in other perfect manifestations
of Christianity, there can be found the good news of the coming
of God's kingdom, calls to love of one's neighbour, to gentleness,
to self-denial, to cleanness of heart; but nothing can be found
there in favour of violence, hostility, revenge, hate, or greed.
On the other hand, in the ideology of Marx, which is the breath
of Communism, you can find appeals to revenge, to the malicious
animosity of one class for another, to the war for personal interests,
but nothing at all about love, sacrifice, forbearance, or spiritual
purity. Christians have often committed these crimes and professedly
under the banner of Christ, but in so doing they have never been
fulfilling his commandments. Our adversaries delight in saying that
Christians have often resorted to force for the defence or spreading
of their religion. The fact is incontestable; but it only shows
that these men were blinded by passion, that they were still unenlightened,
that their sinfulness perverted the most righteous and sacred cause,
that they did not understand of what spirit they were. When Peter
drew his sword in defence of Jesus and smote off the ear of the
high priest's servant, Jesus said to him: "Put up again thy sword
into its sheath, for all that take the sword .shall perish by the
sword."
The Christian revelation and religious life, like all revelation
and all religious life, suppose the existence of man as well as
the existence of God. And man, although enlightened by the light
of grace which comes from God, accommodates this divine light to
the eye of his own spirit and imposes on revelation the limitations
of his own nature and consciousness.
We know from the Bible that God revealed himself to the Jews.
But he was more than the wrathful, jealous, and avenging God reflected
in the consciousness of the Jewish people. Men limited Christian
truth too, and deformed it as well. Thus God was often represented
at some eastern potentate, an arbitrary monarch, and the dogma of
the Redemption was interpreted as the cessation of his judicial
proceedings, begun because he was aggrieved against mankind, the
transgressor of his will. It was this perverted understanding and
human limiting of its doctrines that led men to give up Christianity.
Even the idea of the Church was spoiled. It was made solely an external
thing, solely identified with a hierarchy, with ceremonial observances,
with the transgressions of "parochial Christian," and it was looked
on first, foremost, and above all as an institution. The deeper
and more inward understanding Of the Church as a spiritual organism,
the mystical body of Christ (as St. Paul defines it), was forced
almost out of sight and became accessible only to the few. The liturgy
and the Sacraments were treated only as external rites, for their
profound and hidden meaning completely escaped these pseudo-Christians.
And so people left the Church, shocked by the vices of the clergy,
by the mistakes of ecclesiastical organizations, by a too close
likeness to a government department, by the hypocritical sham piety
or the too ostentatious devoutness of the rank-and-file.
It must always be remembered that the life of the Church
is theandric, there is a divine element and a human element, and
these elements interact. Her foundation is eternal and infallible,
sacred and sinless, it cannot be altered, and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it. The divine element in the Church is
Christ, her head, the fundamental structure of our religion, the
dogmas of divine revelation, the evangelical moral teaching, the
sacraments, the action of the grace of the Holy Spirit. But on the
human side the Church is fallible and subject to change: there can
be deformation, disease, failure, alteration, just as there can
be creative activity, development, enrichment, rebirth. The sins
neither of mankind in general nor of the ecclesiastical hierarchy
in particular are the sins of the Church taken in her divine essence
and they do not lessen her holiness. Christianity requires that
human nature be enlightened and transfigured: human nature resists
and tends to pervert its religion. In the continuous tension between
the two elements sometimes the one is in the ascendant, sometimes
the other.
Christianity raises man and sets him at the centre of the
universe. The Son of God took on our flesh and by so doing sanctified
our nature. The Christian religion points out to man the highest
aim in life and appeals to his exalted origin and great mission.
But, unlike other religions, it does not flatter human nature: it
calls on man heroically to overcome his fallen and sinful state.
Human nature, undermined by original sin, is but little receptive:
it cannot contain the divine truth of Christianity and has difficulty
in grasping the theandric notion involved in the coming of Christ,
God-man. He teaches us to love God and to love man, our neighbour,
and the love of the one and the other are indissolubly bound together.
We love our brethren through God, through the Father, and by our
love for them we evince our love for God. "If we love one another
God abideth in us and his charity is perfected in us." Christ was
both Son of God and Son of man and he revealed to us the perfect
union of God and man, the humanity of God and the divinity of man.
But the natural man finds this fulness of a divine and human love
difficult in practice. Sometimes he veers towards God and away from
man, ready for divine love but indifferent and cruel to his fellows:
it was thus in the Middle Ages. At other times he is all agog to
love and serve man but without reference to God, even opposing the
very idea of him as mischievous and contrary to the good of mankind:
it is thus in the new age, with its Humanism and humanitarian Socialism.
Then, when they have rejected the theandric truth and disassociated
love of man from love of God, people proceed to attack Christianity
and arraign it for their own misdeeds.
IV
The intolerance, fanaticism, and cruelty that Christians have so often
displayed are products of the difficulty, to which I have referred,
that human nature finds in containing the fulness of Christian truth,
its love and freedom. Men assimilate a part of the truth and are content
with that; the full light reaches only a few. Man has a capacity for
perverting anything, even absolute truth, and turning it into an instrument
to serve his own passions. The very apostles themselves, the companions
of Christ in the flesh, enlightened directly by him, understood his
truth only in part and in too human a way, adapting it to their limited
Jewish ideas.
To reproach the Christian religion for the fires of the Inquisition
and the fanaticism, intolerance, and cruelty of the Middle Ages
is to tackle the problem the wrong way round. An attack on medieval
religion, founded on a statement of indisputable (but sometimes
exaggerated) facts, is not an attack upon Christianity but upon
people: it is man attacking man. The theocratic principle was proper
to medieval Catholicism; in virtue of it the Church was considered
over-much as a State, and some even conferred on the Pope a sovereignty
over the whole world. But it was the barbarous nature of man, not
the Catholic Church, that was responsible for the accompanying cruelty
and intolerance. The world at that era was shot through with violent
and bloody instincts, and the Church set herself to organize, tame,
and christianize this anarchically-inclined world. The resistance
of unenlightened human nature was so strong that she did not always
succeed; the medieval world may be regarded as formally Christian
but it was in essence half-Christian, half- pagan, and the ecclesiastical
hierarchy itself was often enough sinful, bringing ambition and
other human passions into the life of the Church and so disfiguring
the truth of Christ. But the divine element continued intact and
enlightening; the evangelical voice of our Lord was always there
to be heard in its unalloyed purity. Had it not been for the Christian
Church the world of the Middle Ages would have been drowned in blood,
and spiritual culture would have perished altogether in Europe,
for the best achievements of the culture of Greco-Roman antiquity
were conserved by her and handed on to succeeding ages. The scholars,
philosophers, and "intellectuals" of those days were all monks,
and it is Christianity we have to thank for the type of chivalric
knight, who made rude vigour gentle and its rough strength noble.
And anyway, the natural ferocity of medieval man was sometimes better
than the mechanization of his contemporary descendant.
Fanaticism did not so much characterize the Eastern Orthodox
Church, which knew no Inquisition or similar violences in questions
of religion and conscience. Her historical faults were due to a
too great submission to the civil power.
There were human perversion and sin both in the Catholic
Church and in the Orthodox Church, but the errors of Christianity
as practised in the world were always the errors of individual Christians,
arising from their natural weakness. If we do not live according
to unsullied truth it is we who are to blame, not truth.
Men require freedom and are not willing to be constrained
to goodness. Nevertheless, they charge God with the consequences
of the unlimited freedom that he has given them.
Is either Christ or Christianity responsible for the fact
that human life is full of evil?
Christ never taught the things that people criticize and
repudiate in Christianity; if we had followed his precepts there
would have been no reason for revolt against his religion.
In one of H. G. Wells's books there is a dialogue between
men and God. The men complain that life is full of wickedness and
suffering, wars, excesses of all sorts, so that it becomes unbearable,
and God replies: "If you don't like these things, don't do them."
This remarkably simple passage is very instructive. Christianity
on earth has to operate in a land of darkness, surrounded by the
forces of wickedness, both natural and supernatural; the might of
Hell is arrayed against Christ and his Church. These evil powers
are at work inside as well as outside the Church and Christianity,
seeking to corrupt the one and change the other; but though the
abomination of desolation is set up in the holy place this none
the less remains holy, and even shines more brilliantly. Those who
have spiritual sight see perfectly clearly that to pervert Christianity
and then blame it for that for which it is not responsible is to
crucify Christ anew. He gives his blood eternally for the sins of
the world, for those who deny and crucify him.
Truth cannot be gauged by the behaviour of men, especially
of the worst of them. Truth must be looked in the face and seen
by its own light, and among the human reflections of that truth
judgement must be made according to the best of them; the Christian
religion must be judged by its apostles and martyrs, by its heroes
and saints, and not by the mass of half-Christian-half-pagans who
do all they can to deform the image of their faith.
Two greats tests were given to Christian mankind, persecution
and victory. The first was surmounted, and by its martyrs and confessors
under the Romans Christianity triumphed in its beginnings as it
does under communist persecution in Russia to-day. But tile test
of victory is harder, and when the Emperor Constantine bowed down
before the Cross and Christianity became the official religion of
the Empire there began a very long test of that kind. And it was
surmounted less successfully than the other. Christians often changed
from persecuted into persecutor, they let themselves succumb to
the temptations of the kingdoms of this world and their power; it
was then that there crept into Christianity those perversions of
its truth that have been made the source of accusations against
it. Christianity is not responsible for that which its critics do
not understand, the joy of earthly victory. Christ: was crucified
once more, for those who looked on themselves as his servants while
they did not know of what Spirit they were.
V
The men of to-day who are so far from Christianity are fond of saying
that the Church ought to be made up of perfect people, saints, and
complain of her that she includes so many faulty persons, sinners,
and pseudo-Christians. It is the standing argument against Christianity,
and it is one that betrays non-comprehension or forgetfulness of the
nature and essence of the Church. The Church exists before all else
for sinners, for imperfect and wandering beings. Her origins are in
Heaven and her principle is eternal, but she operates on the earth
and in time, among elements submerged in sin; her first business is
to succour an erring world at grips with suffering, to save it for
eternal life and raise it to the heavens. The essence of Christianity
is a union of eternity and time, of Heaven and earth, of the divine
and the human, and not any separation between them: the human and
temporal are not to be despised and rejected but enlightened and transfigured.
In the early days of Christianity there was a sectarian movement
called Montanism, which claimed that the Church ought to consist
exclusively of righteous and godly beings and that all others should
be rejected by her; she was for the Montanists a community of those
who had received special gifts from the Holy Spirit and by far the
greater part of mankind, being sinful, was to be completely repudiated
by her. Ecclesiastical consciousness condemned Montanism and upheld
the Church as the home of sinners who repent. The saints are the
Church's bulwark and buttress, but she does not depend on them alone,
for the whole of mankind, a mankind seeking salvation, contributes
in varying degrees to her perfecting. The Church on earth is the
Church Militant warring with evil and iniquity, she is not yet the
Church Glorified. Christ himself consorted with publicans and sinners,
and the Pharisees criticized him for it. His Church has to be like
him. A Christianity that extended its recognition only to good people
would be a pharisaical Christianity. Compassion, forgiveness, charity
towards one's neighbour with all his shortcomings are the work of
Christian love and the means towards its perfection. To accuse Christianity
of the shadow which darkens the destiny of the Church is a product
of pharisaism.
Montanism is an example of false maximizing; it is spiritual
pride, false morality, lack of love. The falsehood of maximizing
consists in requiring the most from others but not from oneself,
we accuse them of not achieving a perfection of goodness that we
have not thought of attempting. Those who have reached holiness
are not in the habit of accusing others. Christianity, the religion
of love, unites austerity, strictness, exactingness towards self
with sympathy, charity, and gentleness towards one's neighbour.
The charges of our contemporaries are only pretexts for their animosity
against Christianity, attempted justifications of their own treachery
towards it: they shelter behind a false morality.
Christianity must not be confused with Tolstoyism, which
is an abstract moralism. Tolstoy criticizes the historical so-called
Christianity radically and cruelly, and his criticism is not without
justification, for it is founded on facts. He claims that the Christian
religion was professed as an abstraction, without any actualization
of it in life and conduct. For him our Lord's moral teaching constituted
the whole of the Christian religion: he was ignorant of or opposed
to its hidden mystical sides. He believed that everything depends
on the truth of a concept, and that once it is conceived it is a
simple matter to put it into practice; if one recognizes the veritable
law of the master of life, that is, of God, it will be easy, by
virtue of that recognition, to actualize it. Tolsloy did not recognize
man's freedom or see the evil lurking in the depths of human nature:
he imagined the source of wickedness to be in the consciousness
instead of in the will and its freedom. Accordingly he did not have
recourse to the help of divine grace for the overcoming of evil
but looked to a modification of consciousness. Jesus Christ was
for him not a saviour and redeemer but a great educator for life,
a moral legislator, and Tolstoy thought Christianity easy of realization
because it is simpler, more advantageous, and wiser to live according
to a law of love than according to the law of hatred favoured by
the world. He had an idea that Christ teaches us "not to do silly
things." He attributed the blame for the fact that the religion
of Christ is not made real in life to theological teaching which
concentrates attention on our Lord himself, building up all things
on the redemption accomplished by him and on divine grace. Tolstoy
attacked the Church at her foundations.
He was right to demand that Christianity be taken seriously
and that Christ's precepts be translated into action, but he was
mistaken in believing that this is easy and that it can be done
simply by means of an enlightened consciousness, without Christ
our Saviour or the grace of the Holy Spirit. In asking men to make
this attempt Tolstoy fell into the error of moral maximizing. For
the rest, he did not succeed in realizing in his own life the doctrine
that he upheld. The only Christianity that he recognized as authentic
was his own personal brand, which convicted the majority of men
of immorality because they did not renounce their private property,
because they did not work with their hands, because they ate flesh-meat
and smoked tobacco. But he was not strong enough to realize moral
maximization for himself; love became for him a law without grace,
a source of indictment. Tolstoy had a well-balanced critical faculty,
he could diagnose sin and describe well the unchristian character
of his contemporary society and culture; but he did not see Christianity
itself, hidden behind the sinfulness, imperfections, and deformities
of Christians. Pride in his own reason prevented him from becoming
interiorly Christian, Christ remained an external teacher and could
not be welcomed within. But Tolstoy was a man of genius, great in
his search for divine truth. Many. men who have neither his genius
nor his thirst for truth attack both Christianity and Christians
without trying to realize any perfection in their own existence
and without the problem of the meaning and justification of life
causing them any suffering, much or little.
VI
It is a mistake to suppose that it is easy to live according to our
Lord's commands, and to condemn his teaching because Christians do
not practise it. But it is also a mistake to suppose that there is
no need to realize the fulness of Christianity in the whole of life.
At every moment of his existence the Christian ought to seek a perfection
like to that of his heavenly Father and to lay claim to the divine
Kingdom; all his life is subject to the words "Seek ye first the kingdom
of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you."
The fact that our nature is sinful and that the ideal is in every
way unattainable on earth must not paralyse our striving after perfection
or quench our longing for the kingdom and righteousness of God. Man
has to try to apply divine truth without worrying about how it will
be realized in the fulness of life. The truth of Christ must be so
realized, though little may be accomplished on earth, though a man
may give but an hour of his life to it; and the right way is found
in the effort to fulfil it and to find the heavenly kingdom without
criticizing our neighbour.
Christianity is entering upon an entirely new era. Henceforth
it will be impossible to live the faith only exteriorly, to stop
short at a ceremonial devotion; believers will have to take the
full actualization of their religion more seriously, they will have
to defend it by their own personalities, by their lives, by their
faithfulness to Christ and his principles, by meeting hatred with
love.
In the Orthodox Church to-day the better elements, those
most sincere and enthusiastic, most capable of self-sacrifice and
faithfulness to our Lord, are coming to the front, while she is
being abandoned by those who were Orthodox only outwardly or from
habit, without understanding of their faith and what it committed
them to. It may be said that the age of a confused Christianity
and paganism is at an end and that a new and better one has begun.
Christianity had become a dominating, an established, State religion,
and the Church was tempted by the sword of Caesar: she even used
it against those whose faith was not in agreement with that of the
orthodox rulers. It was for this reason, because Christianity had
become associated with the idea of persecutor rather than that of
persecuted, that the conscience of many judged it to have ceased
to be the religion of the Cross; it was too often interpreted as
a sanctification of heathen customs that did not call for any real
illumination and transfiguration. The time has now come when Christianity
is persecuted anew, and a greater heroism, a greater expiatory love,
a more complete and conscientious confession of the faith are asked
for from Christians. We shall no longer be a stone of offence in
the path of our religion.
VII
The Christian faith tells us to seek first the kingdom of God and
divine perfection, but it will have nothing to do with day-dreaming,
utopias, or false imagination: it is realist, and the Fathers of the
Church are always appealing for spiritual sobriety. Christian consciousness
has a clear perception of all tile difficulties that beset the way
of perfection, but it knows that "the kingdom of Heaven suffereth
violence and the violent take it by force." Christianity teaches us
to work from within to the outward anti not vice versa; the
perfect life, whether individual or social, cannot be attained through
any programme imposed externally: spiritual rebirth is essential and
it proceeds from freedom and grace. Compulsion will never make good
Christians or a Christian social order; there must be an effective
and real change in the hearts of persons and of peoples, and the realization
of this perfect life is a task of infinite difficulty and endless
duration.
The negation of Christianity due to the shortcomings of Christians
is essentially the ignoring and misunderstanding of original sin.
Those who are conscious of original sin see in the unworthiness
of Christians not a flat contradiction of the worth of Christianity
but a confirmation of it. It is the religion of`redemption and salvation,
and is not forgetful that the world finds pleasure in sin. There
are many teachers who claim that the good life can be compassed
without any real overcoming of evil, but Christianity does not think
so: it insists on this victory, a rebirth; it is radical and more
exacting.
Many men and things in history were decked out with Christian
emblems that they did not deserve. There is nothing baser than lies,
simulation, and hypocrisy, and this state of things provoked protest
and revolt. The State bore the name and symbols of Christianity
without being effectively Christian, and the same could be said
of everything else, science, art, economics, law, the whole of "Christian
culture." There were even those who tried to uphold the rich and
great of this world and the social exploitation of man by man by
an appeal to Christianity! The heathen man still lived on in Christendom;
he was called to take his part in the building up of Christian life
but meanwhile the old evil passions continued to stir within him:
the Church influenced him interiorly but she could not alter his
nature by force -- the process had to be inward and hidden, God's
kingdom comes imperceptibly. A vast amount of hypocrisy, falsehood,
convention, and empty rhetoric accumulated in Christendom, and insurrection
against it was inevitable. The revolt against and rejection of Christianity
often represented simply a sincere wish for the outside to be like
the inside: if there is no interior religion then there should be
none exterior, if the State and society and culture are not Christian
then they should not be called so; there is no need to sham and
tell lies. Such a protest has its positive side in hatred of falsehood
and love of truth; but along with its truth and sincerity, its protest
against lies and hypocrisy, there went a new lie and a new hypocrisy.
Starting from the premise that men and society were in fact
only imitation Christian the stage was reached where it was affirmed
that Christianity itself is untrue and a myth, that the failure
of men means the exploding of their religion. The critics then began
to flatter themselves that they had reached a higher level, a greater
perfection, a more authentic profession of faith. Thus anti- Christian
hypocrisy took the place of Christian hypocrisy, and the adversaries
of Christianity esteemed themselves, as such, more virtuous and
enlightened and understanding of truth than mere Christians can
be. Actually, these people were led astray by the worldly view which
denies truth because it is more impressed by its perversions than
by its reality. In that they have lost the sense of sin they are
inferior to Christians. Nietzsche fought Christianity passionately
because he looked only at degenerate and outward Christians; as
for the Christian religion, he never began to try to understand
it.
The Christian world is undergoing a crisis which is shaking
it to its foundations. The day of sham, outward, rhetorical religion
is past and henceforward it will be impossible to wed the externals
of Christianity with a deceitful paganism. An age of effective realism
is beginning which is tearing away the veils that hide the primordial
realities and bringing the human soul face to face with the mysteries
of life and death. Social conventions, political and governmental
forms have lost all significance; men want to penetrate to the depths
of life, to learn what is essential and what useful, to live in
truth and righteousness.
Under the influence of contemporary upheavals souls are born
thirsting above all for an unobscured and undeformed truth. Man
is tired of falsehood and conventions and all the forms and appearances
that have taken the place of reality; he wants to see the truth
of Christianity, shorn of the deceptions which bad Christians have
imposed on it; he wants to come to Christ himself. The Christian
renaissance will be above all an appeal to Christ and to his truth
freed from all human perversion and adaptation. Man's renewed consciousness
of the permanent fact of original sin need not weaken consciousness
of his responsibility towards the work of our Lord in the world
or nullify endeavours for the forwarding of that work. To make the
truth and commands of Christ real sometimes seems a desperate, impossible
undertaking, and Christianity itself tells us that it is a task
that: cannot be achieved by our unaided human powers. But what is
impossible for man is possible for God. He who believes in Christ
knows that he is not alone: he knows that he is called to realize
the truth of C:hrist in company with Christ himself, his saviour.
© 1999 by translator Fr. Stephen Janos
Permission granted for non-commercial distribution
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