Personal Truths. 4. On the Inner Self. Aphorisms | Мыслящий Наблюдатель

We have already talked about good and evil, about creativity as a way inside of us. Let’s talk about what we find inside ourselves – about the mysterious soul. This part of the book I left in its original form: as a series of aphorisms. Fragmentary observations, I think, cannot be given the appearance of imaginary order, and psychological observations cannot but be fragmentary.

Life of Feelings

Despair has its sweetness, best known to children with their seemingly baseless sobs. Despair is closed in on itself, without past or future, seeing only the ultimate pain within itself and thus seeking the ultimate comfort, with the sharpest hope awaiting such comfort. Despair is most inclined to faith and miracles, and miracles are given to it.

Hope is the virtue of the defeated; the victor has nothing to hope for. All noble battles are fought against the strongest opponents, so hope is appropriate in them. The hopeful seek to embody oneself, to invest oneself in something that one’s fate impedes. The winners are unaware of this concern; their aim is to dissipate, to squander themselves. [1] Only defeat knows the true brilliance of hope.

The more dangerous the thing, the more you want to play with it. This is true not only for a children’s playground but for all of humanity. Play is always guided by the desire to experience something new (here is its kinship with cognition, which in its own way also seeks new sensations of thought); and the more opportunities a toy contains, i. e. the more dangerous it is (danger is precisely the richness of unknown possibilities), the more new sensations it conceals.

Incomprehensible can provoke either laughter or hatred, but never both at the same time. Laughter arises where there is confidence in one’s own worth, in the value of commonly accepted order, which nothing new or incomprehensible can threaten; laughing at the incomprehensible is characteristic of the strong. Weak and afraid people who care for their own life and familiar order, on the other hand, feel hatred towards the incomprehensible; in the new and the incomprehensible they see a threat. The relationships between nations are subject to this rule to the highest degree: here, only those who are afraid are hated, and those who are considered safe are laughed at.

Despair is usually associated with faith, even if of a negative kind. The desperate person believes that nothing else will happen; despair has the power to lend beauty to the acts of the one creating, because just like faith, his soul is fully invested in it. Only indifference is alien to beauty and truth; but faith and despair lead to the same goal.

Sadness is a human emotion, while anguish is animalistic. Sadness is the feeling of someone who was on one’s way to a goal and could already see it, but just fell short; sadness is the knowledge of an unattainable goal, while anguish is unreasoned suffering; it is horror, certain that there is no goal at all.

Daydreaming, or the ability to dream, is not a sign of stagnation. Dreams are movement, but only constrained. If asked what is better: to teach people movement, action, or dreaming, I would say: first dreaming, and then action will follow. A dreamer is not necessarily a failure; one can be either a failure or a complete opposite.

For a child, there are no accidents, only adventures. One is so small that any event engrosses this one completely. An adult, on the contrary, only sees accidents; one considers oneself too “big” for what is happening to capture him. However, no one is ever “big” enough for events to fit in them and not the other way around. The child is right.

Happiness differs from pleasure in the sense that the thirst for happiness leads a person through suffering, whereas the thirst for pleasure leads only through pleasure. The fiery, singing thirst for happiness is the sister of suffering. Pleasure and the desire for it do not teach; only happiness has this ability – and the sorrow that stands in the way of those seeking happiness.

Only the offended can be insightful. The feelings of a hurt person are heightened. Winners can afford to be blind, including morally, they are “not judged,” but the offended always judges oneself.

Hope is born in oppression and poverty, where there is no room for expectations. Expectations are fuller and wider than hopes because they are focused on what is possible; hope is reserved for impossibilities, and can be called irrational expectation. Rationality should manifest in the absence of hope and only in the most moderate and reliable of expectations; this is why animals do not hope: they are sufficiently reasonable without it. What elevates humans above animals is not reason, but the ability to act and direct one’s soul (that is, to hope, believe, and hate) in spite of reason.

In relationships between sexes, virginity is the best bait. It is always attempted to be seduced, and success is seen as a merit. However, the pleasure of the seducer is second-rate, just like any pleasure of destruction, while creative happiness is the opposite. Often things are destroyed not because the value is not seen (only children are capable of that), but because they want to be included in it, to increase their own worth through the destruction. Like an ancient conqueror would say, “Look at how amazing I am: I destroyed this and that, and another thing could not withstand me!” Taking the question wider, it can be said that blasphemy always obtains its value from the desecrated sanctity; therefore, it is effective only as long as the sanctity is alive. “God is the only support and justification for atheism.”

Dangers, trials, and anxieties are not inherently scary, but only when taken apart from hope. “Let it be dark, scary, and cold, but as long as there is a light ahead!” the soul reasons. There are few things that are terrible in themselves, but there are those that block (or we believe they block) the path to the future. It is those things that we fear.

It is not enough to possess the future, but one must possess it every moment. We need to believe in the future; knowing about it is simply not enough. Everyone knows that one have some time ahead, but this knowledge does not save them from melancholy. We also need to hope, that is, to experience at least some of the future events in advance, and not necessarily happy ones – “let them be whatever, as long as they are there!”

There is pleasure in any resistance, in the manifestation of mental resilience in general. For the health of the soul, one must strive and overcome. And happiness is given by the feeling of continuous inner movement; and we fear death as a cessation of aspirations; the same root of the attraction to external movement and space, generally to liberty and breadth.

You can cry either over yourself or over others, but tears are not enough for both. “To walk the path of one’s sorrow, which is the path to oneself” [2], does not mean to pity oneself. On the contrary, the soul is tempered on this path and gains some courage, which could be expressed in the words: “I have experienced this; I have overcome that; let’s see what else I can endure!” The path of sorrow is not the path of tears, but of “cheerful courage,” as I once had to say. Courage is the inability to feel sorry for oneself.

Beauty possesses, torments and burns us, and those who reject it, those who sin against beauty, are punished by their own vulgarity. One cannot fail to recognize beauty and not be a philistine. And at the same time, to see beauty in the world is almost worse than living without it, because everywhere, under the cover of beauty, in the world thrown over us, there are visible gaps, and in them there is horror.

We have no choice but to be spiritual beings. Otherwise, it’s horror, animal anguish without animal joys, a black senseless abyss… Higher abilities require the owner to have religiosity or madness; one cannot be “a mere human,” or rather, “a mere human,” the ideal of the average human condition, one can only be at average abilities. Where abilities are higher than ordinary, there is no possibility of internal balance on such a shaky support as “common sense” or “natural inclinations.” There a person learns the madness of “sense” and the aimlessness of “inclinations,” although one does not become holy from this, but continues to think and be carried away with even greater zeal.

Spiritual life is a fire, and in whom it burns, beneath that the ice of everyday life melts, through which we wander, dissatisfied with the past, not having reached the future, and it falls deeper and deeper into the fundamental principles of things, nowhere finding solid ground, peace, home … The man of soul is unsettled, homeless and dangerous, a wanderer and a stranger wherever one goes. The fruits of one’s spiritual life may be pleasant or interesting to society if the individual is a poet or a thinker, but to the person oneself, this spiritual life is more of a burden than a gift. It signifies heightened sensitivity, genuine joy, but also genuine sorrow, and always and in everything – the inability to be satisfied, with oneself, one’s work, or one’s place in the world. For those like Versilov, like all of Dostoevsky’s deepest heroes, nothing will ever be enough. Remember: “Lord, I understand why Thou have set such limits on human life – to account for those to whom everything will soon become boring… But for me, that time is too short, I will never tire of living!” exclaims one character in “The Adolescent.” The inability to fit into this world drives such souls to anxiety and danger, to a self-destructive, “sizzling life.” [3] They are burdensome to society and to their fellow beings, but if society learns something new about man and one’s soul, it is because of them.

The complete, deep, and in all its fullness and depth, feeling of life is the feeling of death. Joyfulness in a person is always accompanied by deep melancholy; the known combination of cheerfulness and a gloomy sense of the world in many individuals is not accidental. The point is not simply that any emotion that comes to an end passes into its opposite; the point is that to feel the world fully means to be horrified by it. The mournful aspect of Christianity cannot be eliminated by any joy of life. If you will, repairing one pocket with a patch does not cover the hole in the other: joys of the body do not heal the soul. Sorrow is unavoidable and can only be overcome by faith. Yes, the body has its sanctuaries and heights, but what is lofty for the body is low for the soul. Herzen and Rozanov are wrong in their reproaches to Christianity; and even they eventually came to sorrow, only one – outside faith, and the other – outside Christianity. They say, by the way, about “Rozanov’s shamelessness,” but I see in him rather stubborn misunderstanding of some things, an unwillingness to think, and only an inclination to feel, and feel only something pleasant. Regarding sex and spirit, he simply did not see the question, as if he knew nothing about this relationship. Here he saw only needless shame imposed on an individual by certain external circumstances, the State, and the Church; Rozanov did not notice an independent question of the spiritual life regarding sex and spirit. But it is there. High for the body, low for the soul, nothing can be done about it; passions are both holy and beautiful, but with their holiness and beauty. In the love between sexes, there is a powerful compelling force, but is there truth in it? And the soul needs truth – a light, weightless bread. It is almost impossible to extinguish the fire of the body within oneself, but beside it and higher in the soul burns a completely different flame: the spirit. So, Rozanov as if he never saw this flame of the spirit, as opponents of his did not see the value of the body. “The physical union of a man and a woman,” Tolstoy said, for example, “is nasty and vile.” [4] Not at all. In our infinitely sad life, it is not “nastiness” but a bright joy, although it belongs to the category of lesser joys, if one can call experiences that speak only in the language of the body. It belongs to the category of those joys about which one can say, “Thank You, Lord, for this joy, and forgive us for it!” But this joy is only accessible to the one who gives himself, it is given on condition. A sullen consumer quickly fills himself up and runs to the next pleasure, and for this one, all joys are really poisoned… but happiness, you see, is only given by forgetting oneself.

We enjoy movement, find rest tiring, and dread the thought of it coming to a complete stop. The soul’s life is most afraid of depression, anguish, that is, coming to a state of internal, tense immobility. Let anything happen – whether it be uphill or downhill, emotional highs or sadness – anything is better than immobility and anguish. It is not frightening to die when you soar towards death on a rising or falling wave, surrounded by emotional movements, alternating in brightness and shadow. The only horror is the motionless kingdom of anguish. To be homeless and hopeless is good in youth, when even in sad circumstances, a happy hope looks out onto the world, for which lack is full, uncertainty is sweet, and misfortune is exhilarating, because in all things it only sees a path and becoming and transitions, and never the end or a stop. Youth is always easy because it is surrounded by a glittering smoothness of hope…

Semion Frank is right: the charm of sexual temptation lies not so much in sensual love as in the promised fullness of life, and sensual love itself means little – or almost nothing – for the soul. What we need is not it, but something to which it hints, for which it is only a sign. The deep mistake is to consider sensual love as the goal of youthful aspirations, or any aspirations at all. On the contrary, there is something in us that resists the sensual world and does not want to disappear in it. So, what is this – some kind of solid insoluble residue that not only cannot be dissolved in sexual passion, but resists it in every way? (If Rozanov were here, he would shout “sodomite!” at anyone who thought like this, as he shouted at every opponent of his philosophy, but these Rozanovian exclamations, it should be noted, only hint at the femininity of his own character…) However, explaining the spirit’s attractions by sexual preferences is not so much strange as it is somewhat arbitrary: why not the other way around? Moreover, if “sodomy” is seen as a manifestation of the feminine nature under a masculine shell, as is now accepted, then why should precisely the feminine ability to dissolve completely in sensuality be foreign to these people? It is strange and difficult to explain, and this explanation does not apply to the great Plato… As for me, I think that this force of resistance is the soul.

There is a dark side of the soul that cannot be illuminated even by self-cognition. It is on this dark side, with its thirst for strength, cunningness and victory, that Nietzsche found his truths, and many others after him… Since evil exists exclusively for itself, and where there is even a little life for others, there is already no completeness of villainy – this part of the soul is closest to pure evil. The spiritual life consists precisely in suppressing and correcting this desire at all costs. Enlightenment of this area consists in the fact that we live and fight not for ourselves – and only then truth and beauty are accessible to us. Power is not destructive for the owner only when it is directed at goals that are foreign to one’s immediate animal welfare. The “blond beast” that Nietzsche called for is the very creature that lives and fights exclusively for oneself. Yes, we really want strength and power; but we remain human only as long as we realize that these desires are pre-human, purely animal, and submit not to them, but to the spirit, to a principle that is outwardly powerless but mighty. There is no greater enemy of man than one’s own strength and the desire to be strong.

Greater sensuality requires at least greater caution. Contrary to modern opinions, the spirit is not the same thing as sexuality, nor is it its opposite, but rather something above it. The opposite of sex is not spirit, but reason. Their struggle is constant and barren, because it is the struggle of parts for the priority of becoming the whole. Victory in it is illusory. The man of reason constantly feels temptation to submit to instincts, while the man of flesh finds in oneself inevitable doubts, notions of sin and shame. The person who chooses between reason and sex cannot have stable mental balance, but only constant fluctuations between incompatible extremes. The only way out is through the spiritual life, which, seeking material for the construction of personality, does not disdain reason or sex, drawing from the state in which the soul is at the moment. The point is that man is not what one does and experiences in this moment, one is always something more. Neither reason nor sex, but the spirit, for which thoughts and passions are only images and possibilities of existence.

The more we immerse ourselves in the sensations of the flesh, the more death will torment us. Death is in the flesh, it is for the body, and the more the soul binds itself to the joys and hopes of the body, the sharper its feeling of death will be. The path of pleasures is the path of mortal anguish. Hedonism is a hidden form of suicide. Its main and insoluble contradiction is that satisfying the body does not satisfy the soul at all. Seeking new sensations excites the body, but the soul, in the midst of pleasures, feels only a pulling emptiness. The soul is not filled with anything material, and even more so, everything earthly pulls it down. This is not speculation but an undoubted spiritual experience. “I plucked the flowers of unrighteous pleasures,” said Oscar Wilde about himself. But the “righteous” ones are no better than the “unrighteous;” both plunge the soul into darkness. By enjoying, the soul only learns to thirst and never be satisfied; only the body is truly satisfied, which the soul only witnesses. Enjoyments without spiritual nature are always pleasures of the observer, as the soul does not participate in the joys of the body and only observes them from the side… Thus, it pleases not itself, but only learns to thirst infinitely, increasingly diversifying, which never leads to satisfaction, as these are foreign desires.

One can search for the fullness of life either in passion, in the turmoil of swiftly passing experiences, or in its opposite, which is difficult to name, but which is characterized by clarity and depth of impressions. This unnamed opposite can be called contemplation. Passion offers an undeniable opportunity for fullness, but it quickly burns out, leaving only ashes. Contemplation is slow, transparent, and profound, but even it soul cannot withstand for long, though it feels that it is its refuge and support… Sin – I return to this concept again – lies in wait for us on the path to the fullness of life. Those who have not pursued it do not know temptations. The thirst for passion lives in the heart together with the thirst for transparency and depth, in one and the same people; perhaps, this thirst is the first step on the path to transparency and depth… We crave for the fullness of life, but it can be sought on different paths: the path of the body or the path of the spirit. I am afraid to say, but it seems that even the insatiability, the inextinguishable thirst manifested in passion, is already a phenomenon of the spirit – which is in no way satisfied with base excitements of the soul, or, speaking more “modern” language, that part of the person who is most closely connected with the body. I would say that passion is wicked not because the flesh plays and triumphs in it, but because it, contrary to promises, only moves us away from the desired fullness of life; because its promises are false. It does not require proof, that only a complete fool can be satisfied only with the life of passions. Where there is something of the spirit, passion is always only an element, a component, but not the whole. And perhaps the worst thing is not to be in passion, but to be subject to it; to be willing to stop at the easy delight that nature has prepared for us – in essence, enjoying the pleasures of the body, which do not require the soul. Then there is still hope…

An undeniable and significant part of one’s personality, I would even say – its foundation, is constituted by the shame experienced at various times. It can even be argued that sanctity, as the highest level of personal development on earth, is precisely linked to an all-encompassing sense of shame. Pride, the opposite of sanctity, is therefore characteristic of small-minded people because it has nothing to build itself upon. Everything by which a person is truly exalted is swept aside by pride – only empty arrogance remains, strained and unsure of itself … “Pride goes before destruction;” this is a wholly accurate statement. By ceasing to be ashamed, a person loses the ground beneath one’s feet; and when I say “ashamed,” I mean that meekness is not far from shame. Religious people might express this idea in the following way: “Our deeds are justified before God only as long as we are ashamed.”

Knowledge of the World

The life of peoples and individuals is determined by their conception of the inconceivable. In other words, in relation to insoluble questions, one must always behave as if they are resolved. It is only vicious to desire to avoid these questions, representing them as non-existent or unreasonable. Conceptions of the unthinkable are rooted primarily in religious inspiration; it is in itself an immutable fact, but intermittent and uneven. Even religious genius at times only knows the content of one’s inspirations; entire epochs may be deprived of them.

In the most important matters, the self-determination of the soul is inevitable, and direct, let alone final judgments, are impossible. “Between the judgments: ‘There is a God’ and ‘There is no God,’ said Chekhov, ‘is a white snow-covered field,’ and it is impossible to remain in this field – you will freeze. Life requires inner certainty from the soul in these matters, but any firm word about them immediately becomes a lie. Sanctity is generally what does not tolerate any speech about itself.

All that is unknown is secret and wonderful; it is wonderful because it is secret, that is, filled with unknown internal meaning. Beauty is participation in secret, that is, in meaning; secret itself is meaning. A world without secrets, pervaded by knowledge, will lose both its charm and depth.

The ability to become disillusioned speaks of the lowliness or weariness of the mind, while some see it as a companion to growth and knowledge. The disillusioned one has become exhausted by knowledge, but this does not mean that one have knew anything. One sees repetition everywhere and there is “nothing new under the sun” for this one, but only unique objects possess meaning, so disillusionment kills meaning. It may be hiding in things, but the disillusioned and weary person will not see it. For poets and philosophers, on the other hand, all things happen for the first and last time, only for this reason they are meaningful.

The wisdom of the disillusioned is self-consolation of someone who has refused a precious gift that feels tempting but does not want to accept or is afraid to. This one walk away, regretting it inwardly while speaking outwardly about the insignificance of the gift. In the venomous wisdom of those who refuse – there is envy of those who accept the gift.

Close and contemporary are rarely beautiful, but they acquire beauty as they move away. Separation nourishes not only love but also aesthetic sense. “True-to-life” art, which adheres to the low and banal, sins not only against beauty but also against truth, since truth and beauty are one.

One can talk about Fate only when there is a contradiction between a certain gift and a desire or ability to apply it. In other words, fate can only be seen where the possible is not the same as the actual. As long as the possible is separated from the actual only by chance, as with animals, there is no fate, as there is no soil for tragedy. In tragedy, fate manifests itself as a counteraction to personal will.

Personality develops in proportion to constant self-refutation. Stopping progressive self-refutation means mediocrity or stagnation. Shame is a natural attitude of the present towards the past. A thinking person is ashamed of one’s past thoughts for their imperfection, not for their subject matter. A person who is truly capable of rejecting one’s past and its sanctities is not worth a broken penny: such readiness speaks only of thoughtlessness. The development of thought is valuable only in the constancy of its subject.

A life deprived of achievable goals poses completely different questions to the one who lives it than the one in which goals can be achieved and obstacles overcome. The mind in such a position begins to reflect not on ways, but on things. What is the use of knowledge of ways, that is, paths, to someone whose experience has convinced of the unattainability of the goals to which these paths lead? Such a life cultivates greater concentration on the internal and distrust of everything external, especially in the pursuit of success.

In every complex and rich life, there is meaning – especially if it is not sought but accepted along with life. There is no meaning separate from life, not contained in feelings, actions, and words. It is useless to seek it out, one can only possess it; the moment one reaches out for it, it disappears. Examining closely one’s life or one’s meaning is not an idle or shameless curiosity. If I may say so, we learn from the meaning of our lives, and do not teach the others the meaning of their lives. The latter is never successful.

Life is as rich in content as the soul of the person living it is rich and meaningful. Meaning consists in the internal connections between phenomena. Life is far from meaningless, but to see the richness of its internal connections, one must have as many connections as possible within oneself, if not a comparable number. The world reflects the observer: the wise see wisdom in it, and the simple see simplicity. The world is understood only through self-improvement; external knowledge “about the habits of things” is insufficient if it is not supplemented by good knowledge of one’s own soul.

In childhood, we find many more thoughts and ideas in our soul than we should, assuming that the source of these ideas was only personal experience. What personal experience could a child have under five? Psychology should start its hunt for the human soul there, in the darkness of early life; but psychology prefers not to see in this darkness, at best talking about “imitating elders,” and closing its eyes to the presence of a fully formed personality in even the smallest child. True, this personality is locked behind a dark wall; it’s hard for it to talk about itself; it observes but doesn’t act; its almost sole task is to learn to talk to people and control the body… but it exists. Leaving its dark garden to come among humans, the soul knows more than it could learn from all of the lullabies of our world. Often, it’s forced to forget all its knowledge; often, its awakened emotional life is extinguished – and this is called growing up! – but still, in its dark, sad and kind garden, the soul knew something that can’t be learned from other sources. Everything essential to the soul is taken out from this garden. Beyond its borders, there will no longer be knowledge, but only a remembrance of wonderful things seen and heard before, as Plato told us… And the Sermon on the Mount, and all other beautiful and truthful things, we heard it in this garden, where the night is cozy, the world is gentle, and the beasts are kind.

The meaning of what is happening is only revealed afterwards; hence it is usually concluded that there is no meaning at all. However, the question can be posed differently: our knowledge and thinking are limited by the direction from the past to the future, so every future meaning appears to us as inconsistent, as something non-existent. If foresight (that is, the sense of presence of the future in the present) were a more widespread human ability, the thought of a future meaning would not seem so absurd.

Modern psychology says, “It is not things that are important, but our attitude towards them,” and in some cases achieves great success. But by saying so, it introduces a bad relativity and lack of solid ground into life, which is so necessary for the soul. Changing our attitude towards unchanging things is good against small unpleasantness, but life as a whole, seen from this point of view, loses all internal meaning. To say that the meaning of things is what we think about them is the same as saying that things have no meaning at all. Either we know something that is inherent in things from the beginning and independent of us, or we only study our own thinking, thinking that we are learning something about things. In the second case, there cannot simply be knowledge other than knowledge about man. However, I believe that in reality, knowledge goes down the middle path: by knowing things, we study ourselves, and vice versa, because there is an inner relationship and common origin between the knower and the known which makes mutual understanding possible.

The best indication of delusion is the confidence of the person in one’s own truths. Calmness in the pursuit of truth is in itself a bad thing, and it does not prevent us, the few followers of Wisdom who have heard her call on the streets and squares, from longing for confidence and peace, for an eternal home where there is no room for anxiety and restlessness… A most “cursed” question is whether it is possible for a person to gain knowledge while preserving one’s inner peace and moral integrity. I am afraid that insoluble internal contradictions, as in the case of Dostoevsky, are the only condition for knowledge of human… So what can a thinker, psychologist, or poet do? If you desire knowledge, then goodbye, peace; if you desire peace, then you will not learn anything about people. What to do? Complete inner balance is usually complete inner emptiness. The balanced person does not experience any outward drive, does not take anything from the world, and as a result, is empty. Passions, attachments, aspirations attach a person to the world, this was noted long ago, but they also fill one up, because a person who is not interested in anything in the world – who has not given up his attachments like a monk, but has never had them at all – is, as Gogol said, “rubbish in every respect.” One may disdain the world if one desires, but one must first accept it within oneself, love what is deserving of love, mourn what must be mourned, experience the sweetness and sharpness of aspirations…

True values do not lie in things, but in our relationship to things; they exist during collision, impact, the interaction between the soul and the world, and only represent a possibility before and after. There is no truth expressible in words that one could teach humanity. There is only a certain relationship to things that can be transmitted to people. The Sermon on the Mount teaches us to touch things in a certain way; it teaches us to give the soul the right inclination, as the correct inclination is given to the bow. But with regards to truths expressible in words, it leaves us in complete ignorance: “what is God? what is He preparing for us? what is the world? what is death?” The mind thirsts for exactly this, but there are no words to answer its questions. The thirst of the mind is unquenchable. Truths, completeness of life, eternity can only be touched, but looking at them, we encounter emptiness: we cannot look straight at them just as we cannot look straight at the stars.

Sense and beauty are scattered everywhere in the world and constantly appeal to the heart, but we cannot fully express them. The meaning of the world can only be expressed by creating another world, and this is what creativity is for. There is no other way. Therefore, the soul is in eternal torment: it shines, it is close, very close… but cannot be grasped, cannot be expressed; it can only be felt and admired. This is all we are given on this side of existence. Our heart is full of meaning, and our mind is full of itself, and there will never be peace between them.

Who instilled in us a thirst for truth and beauty? And why should “matter,” which is all that is seen in the world now, strive for beauty and truth? What relation do these categories have to reproduction and finding food? Why is man unable to be an animal and perpetually experiences the “feeling of despair and damnation” that Dostoevsky spoke of? If it is all “matter,” then why does matter need truth and beauty?! Moreover, these are not some “complex abstractions” that we arrive at through exercising reason, but rather the most primary and profound sensations inherent in the soul from the beginning and originating from no other principles. Furthermore, we are born with a sense of the presence of truth and beauty in the world, and only as we grow older and sharpen our minds do we learn from it that there is no truth or beauty in the world, but only number, measure, and weight. There is an initial crack in the personality, and one is compelled to tear between two incompatible truths. We thirst for truth, but we get two at once from different sources, and we never quench our thirst.

The more evolution a creature undergoes, the less significance is given to expediency in its life. The spirit, as the highest stage in the ladder of life, is completely expedient. This is the main reason for the failure of all attempts to “rationally” explain and transform society. The main concern of reformers turns out to be secondary from the perspective of human life, and conversely, secondary and irrational details become the main components of human life. Society can only be “rationally organized” if the level is lowered, looking at humanity roughly as a livestock factory. This is a path that even the great Plato could not avoid, not to mention later dreamers. To be fully human, one must be sufficiently irrational. The more expedient we are ourselves and force others to be, the closer we get to animals. This is why great revolutionaries and gravediggers of the old society have so little humanity in them! They are sullenly rational; everything truly human irritates them, whether it be love, art, or religion. This is the contradiction: the movement towards “higher rationality,” i. e. towards the unshakability of practical actions, only brings people closer to the animals, subject to expediency along with chance.

However, in addition to rationalism, there is another dark, subterranean movement that is almost inseparable from rationalism. This movement represents both reason and freedom as the external manifestations of the play of unconscious elements. They have become so fused together that when we talk about one, we always have the other in mind. On the one hand, there is a strictly rational view of the world. On the other hand, the bearer of reason, man, is seen as almost removed from the universe itself, and its “reason” is reduced to the play of molecules and forces, predetermined since the beginning of time. The rare has occurred: the method of thinking created by the efforts of reason has acquired an independent existence, has been liberated, and has, first and foremost, debunked its creator. “Reason,” ratio is silently acknowledged as nonexistent, but rational methods of cognition triumph. This unprecedented rebellion of the tool against the actor has not yet been noticed by everyone, and many, in error and still living in the lively traditions of the 19th century, speak of the “power of reason.” In reality, under the domination of rational thinking, we observe the cult of the unconscious. The idea of a faceless evolution, in which faceless forces forge faceless tools, has become commonplace, but few realize that the knowing mind, still considered to be a source of pride, is assigned the last place as a “faceless tool” of faceless forces in this chain. Fortunately, our epoch does not like to ask questions. If there is no reason in us and there is only a play of forces, then where is it located at all? What or who is engaged in knowledge – atoms, molecules, neurons? This question is resolved (unconsciously, of course) in a pseudo-religious spirit: it is implied that some abstract “reason” is being recognized, to which we are only servants. Without this, even somewhat hidden thought, science would seem even more grim and hopeless than it looks now. Reason is worshipped in the same way that deists worship their god (I intentionally do not capitalize the letter): recognizing it in a certain, but very conditional sense. This unimaginable mixture of deistic religiosity, rational thinking, complete determinism, and some unprecedented and completely unfounded (i. e. inexplicable from the dominant determinism) pride is called a positive scientific worldview.

It is curious indeed that under the guise of “rationalism,” an at least partially irrational doctrine has long prevailed, believing in the possibility of rationally comprehending an irrational, meaningless world, in which even the perceivers themselves are mere shadows of blind, irrational forces. I cannot find a fitting word for this ideological composition, born of weariness and disillusionment with everything but earthly power. It is, in any event, the worldview of an old and exhausted society. It is currently triumphant only because it provides a sweet sleep and a soft bed for a significant portion of humanity, but it offers no real resolution, nor even an attempt to resolve, the soul-wrenching questions, and is utterly incomplete. On the warrior’s shield is written “reason,” and all of his weapons are forged in the smithy under the same banner, but one’s belief is unclear and is not clarified by reason.

I find it hard to believe that both Goodness and Beauty arise from “natural selection.” Their sources are somewhere else. It is clear to everyone that in human society, for example, a devotion to Goodness and Beauty does not lead to success, and is often opposed to success and the hope of leaving offspring… They are supernatural, i. e. excessive for a “natural being;” highly inexpedient and useless from the perspective of “fitness.” However, they exist and attract us, from which I conclude that Nature is not our mother, but only the soil on which we have risen. Goodness and Beauty have a different source, and I know where to look for it.

However, even where I search for them, everything is dark. I believe that there is a God, but I do not know what He is like, and what awaits my soul after earthly death. Any certainty leaves me when I think about it. The only way to know in this area, as it seems to me, is the way of careful observation of my own soul and what is akin to it. The matter is not just that, let’s say, the Sermon on the Mount is a brilliant work, a pearl and the flower of the human spirit. The matter is that, and this is the most important thing, it shines with the same light that I find in the depths of my own soul – a feeling that cannot be conveyed in words, for which only a clear, fresh and pure autumn day can serve as an example… The main thing is that I know inside myself, and perhaps always knew, the life that Christ talks about. If I did not know this in myself, books would remain books, and words would remain words. But I have reason to believe in God, and these reasons lie within me. It is not pride that makes me confess this, but joy that I felt when I first heard the words of Christ.

If we could figure out once and for all what beauty is and how it relates to desire. Leo Tolstoy resolved the issue by rejecting beauty altogether. Where does deception begin? At what point does sensuality mingle with beauty? For example, the beauty of a mountain range, a sunset, or the sea – they do not speak to our sensuality. Let us rise higher: the beauty of a tree leaf, the beauty of a meadow and a forest – is there sensuality in them? It seems not. And here is the crown and the riddle: the beauty of the human body, in which perfection combines with desirability. Where there is desire, there is sin. But what is sin? I think we can say: a readiness to submit oneself to lower desires. Therefore, the contradiction is that beauty elevates us, but sensuality drags us down, adding desire to inspiration… And what should we do? Should we not look at people, or take the ability to arouse desire as beauty and be content with that, as Rozanov did? Plato speaks of the same in “Phaedrus,” describing two horses that pull the chariot of the soul, one of which contemplates, the other desires. But Plato, as a person from a more harmonious era, believed that even the soul that could not resist the second horse’s urge can still be saved: “For there is no such law that those who have embarked on the path of celestial wandering should go to darkness and wander beneath the earth.” It would be good for us to share Plato’s confidence that beauty cannot completely destroy the soul!

The truth of romance lies in the fact (which I have written about before) that all the good things in life come from somewhere else; and, conversely, everything that comes from here is boring, meaningless, and aimless. We must strive for that which is part of life but is not life itself, that which is higher in relation to life – or at least exists in some other plane. To live, giving the greatest value to life itself, like the sea in which we are immersed, is to submit to vulgarity in the primordial sense of the word. Gogol described these “existers” in abundance. One of the answers to Pushkin’s “Stanzas” – “life is given to us for life” – makes life meaningless and is by no means an answer: if “life for life,” i. e. for oneself, then it is for nothing. To live for something means – do we need to explain it? – to live for something that is not life, something that is outside of it. It is this invisible “something” that gives our life its taste and breath, but does not belong to either its misfortunes or its blessings. To search for this “something” among things and experiences is pointless; it is attainable only by going away from all the things in the world – on the path within oneself.

The destruction of false worldviews leaves nothing behind, as they always strive for the greatest possible integrity and never forget to answer any question. Therefore, to free a person from lies does not mean to “return one to the original state,” but to deprive one of all values and meanings. Liberate the deceived is deadly dangerous for themselves. If before they had false answers, bad rules of life, now they remain in the desert where “anything is possible.” The former rich and complex culture, with its opposition of good and evil, simple and complex, with its opportunities and appeal to human freedom, has disappeared. Moreover, a man seduced by a “holistic worldview” (such as the worldview of the Russian revolution) is not accustomed to a culture based on possibilities and freedom. This one was taught completely differently: that there are unambiguous answers to all questions, that the individual is not responsible for one’s actions, that the ultimate judge in matters of morality is the state or at least public opinion… And now unambiguous answers have disappeared, the state has gone, the individual has gained freedom, and we have been presented with a spectacle of unprecedented moral defeat.

Spiritual development means a constant threat of self-deception and various misconceptions, from which following instincts almost completely frees us – after all, instincts do not make mistakes. The difference between spiritual life and instinct lies precisely here. Only the spirit is expedient. It always strives to get out of the state in which it finds itself, but at the same time pays for this ability to desire something else with constant mistakes. Instinct does not make mistakes, but it never leads anywhere. It can be defined as the ability to take its place without experience or errors – always unchanging. The spirit strives, the instinct remains. The spirit seeks the unknown, the instinct knows the known well. In conclusion, the spirit is the way, the instinct is the place, and if we want to avoid dangers, we must refuse the way.

Characters

“This one lived his life” and “this one knew his life” refer to two different people. The one who has lived does not know; the one who knows to the very end will yearn for what one has not experienced. The breadth of experience is inversely proportional to its content. People don’t need conclusions; they know “how” and don’t ask “why.” A paradoxalist would draw a conclusion here about the superiority of inexperienced thinking. I will only say that failures on the path to gaining experience through ordinary means are useful.

Frivolity is the inability to feel unhappy. As Pascal said, one should fear death when it is far away, not when it is near. This means that the profound Pascal is actually advising us to be frivolous.

It is quite possible that not all people have a soul, therefore the word of God is not addressed to everyone, and “death” has different meanings for different people. This explains the persistent atheism of some, natural for a being without a soul. In this case, both testimonies about human nature are true.

The desire to “settle in life” and to understand life are mutually exclusive. Those who seek knowledge, that is, truth, will never be “settled in life.” Only by closing one’s eyes to the nature of things can one derive benefit from them. It has long been said that “to succeed, one must be superficial or downright foolish.” Under careful inspection, things acquire meaning but lose the ability to be useful. The same can be said about beauty. Beauty is useless to those who are capable of seeing it; desire and satisfaction in relation to beauty can only exist where it has not been noticed.

Fear and threat are the guides of dignity, strange as it may sound. Dignity manifests itself in Job before the Lord, in David before Saul, always in the small and threatened, in the face of the weak external unyielding threat. Therefore, it is necessary to know how to be afraid; fearlessness does not rise to its danger unless it is above it. But most dangers are greater than a person, so one must learn to rise to them, that is, to fear and overcome one’s fear.

Higher feelings are foolish. Cynics are right in their contempt for “sentimentality:” truly “smart” people only crush and trample. Compassion is useless to the one who is compassionate, and cynics know this well. All their wisdom lies in preserving their feelings; at best, they are ready to spend these feelings only on themselves. After all, cynics are not insensitive: most of them are afraid of death, but only their own; they do not have the strength to care about someone else’s. Therefore, the thought of someone else’s suffering they call sentimentality.

Kierkegaard is right: both faith and wisdom are manifestations of passion. An impassive sage is just as absurd as an impassive saint. Only cynics are impassive, guarding their emotional movements for themselves alone. The consumer religion of cozy pleasures fosters apathy much more successfully than ascetic confessions; it teaches to direct mental forces only to small things, which ultimately cultivates the insignificance of emotional movements, while ascetic faith, on the contrary, teaches to invest the soul only in the great, without being distracted by trivialities.

There is nothing more useful for development than facing unsolvable contradictions and insurmountable obstacles. I would even say that this is the only way to grow, provided that spiritual height (that is, distance of view) has value. Of course, all these things are not good for those who want to live their life without noticing it…

Wit and the ability to love are intertwined. In other words, wit is an erotic ability. Like love, wit is the ability to find greatness in small things; wit extracts more from the relation of objects than they contain separately. Essentially, this is the definition of love: love also extracts more from the relation of two souls than they contain separately.

Courage is the unwillingness to think about the consequences; nobility is the unwillingness to believe the worst about others; hope is the unwillingness to know the truth about one’s own future. In nobility, courage, and hope, the individual rises up against probability; the undesirable and the negative are, after all, the most probable. Humanity and religion address only the improbable; “positive knowledge” wants to know only about the probable and regular. However, nothing is more improbable than God, universe, and soul.

Mysticism is a weakness of the spirit. It is not a coincidence that Prince Myshkin referred to himself as a “materialist”… An ardent desire for faith is more costly for a mystic than faith itself; this one may be compared to a lover who values erotic experiences over love; but such a lover loves oneself above all.

Suffering is dissatisfaction with what exists. The return of man to the animal world (the goal set by modernity) should begin with the destruction of the ability to suffer, that is, with the spreading of universal contentment. The measure of humanity is the ability to say, “I do not want to be who I am.” “I do not want” is a sign of high spiritual development. Man entered into a relationship with God (in the original meaning of the Russian word, with Fate) only when one began to contradict Him. Before that, one was only a part of God, and after that, one became His son. Children always contradict their parents, and this loving contradiction is the meaning of their existence. Until there was contradiction, there was no man.

I think that youth is closer to the sources and depths of spiritual life, and that preserving youth is valuable not only externally. In youth, not simply referring to the early years, but to the time of joyful readiness for anxieties, we are closer to our model, to what a person should be. “Be like children.” Youth is not the same as immaturity. Immaturity can accompany a person even until death, and is not a measure of any particular spiritual merit. Youth is based on a certain ease of dealing with things and an unencumbered mind, primarily unencumbered by habits. Youth loves to seek more than to own, to spend more than to save. These are its characteristics. I think – and I cannot say anything in my defense except “I think” – that this state of the soul is more natural, more native, closer to its eternal home, than the state of a supposedly “sober” but truly lost and abandoned “maturity;” and the great among us never lost these traits until the very end.

“Sobriety,” late skepticism, and coldness are all signs of a wasted in youth soul strength. Those who had something to invest in their youth, whose souls did not encounter obstacles along their path, those who loved and created by choice, where and as much as they could, are free to speak of the hopelessness and gracelessness of the world, for they have already tasted as much hope and grace as they wanted. Happy youth creates cool skeptics, but what about those who only encountered obstacles on the path of their soul’s movements in youth? Only to keep hope, because these people have not yet wasted themselves. Cynicism is a measure of success in life and is incomprehensible to those who have no success.

Irony is weak persons’ attitude towards things that are stronger than them. Irony serves as a complement to fear. Either we are afraid of certain things, or we ironize over them. Thus, irony is a psychological self-defense mechanism for the weak against threats. It speaks of the precariousness of its possessor’s situation; further along the line of those who use irony are the jester and the fool; the former is ironical by order – and this one is still more secure than the latter who is deliberately deprived of everything, naked and powerless against the force one ridicules. Periods in which irony becomes a dominant or at least widespread worldview are extremely unfavorable periods. In irony, as in Stoicism, there is weariness and powerless. The ironist lightens the burden of one’s soul by treating heavy things lightly, but also closes the way to understanding what one is laughing at. It must be said more: laughter as a philosophy of life is a philosophy of non-understanding. It allows us to take everything lightly, and that is bad.

“Optimism” or “pessimism” of a person is determined to a great extent by the breadth of one’s horizons and the depth of one’s perspective. The inability to look further into the future or the past beyond a certain point creates “optimists;” but the further our gaze, the more we see causes and effects, the more connections are revealed to us in the world, the easier it is for us to be pessimistic. Believe me, a pessimist is not far from asking God for limited vision; it would give this one peace. Looking at the world, a pessimist sees too many connections: more than can fit in the mind. Such sharp vision makes the universe if not meaningless, then with too many meanings. This makes it difficult to maintain confidence and calmness of spirit…

The only reason why we can value the human body is that it is the temple of the soul. It is even more reason for revering the remains. [5] We love the spirit embodied in the body, not something else. If we were striving for this “something else,” as materialism thinks, love would hardly occupy more space in human life than it does in the animal world. It should be said and emphasized that love is spiritual by its nature, although constantly in contact with lower, non-spiritual experiences, and constantly under threat from them. I once said that a person who values erotic experiences above love is bad. This one is not just in danger, but already in captivity. Pleasure drives out freedom. It is good if such a person experiences mortal anguish among one’s pleasures – the feeling of a soul oppressed and conquered by the flesh; this one still has a way to freedom… The direct spiritual feeling, to which one can only believe in matters of religion and morality, says that of all pleasures, only the pleasures of effort, creativity, and self-giving are not sinful, that is, do not bring the soul closer to death. All other pleasures are destructive. This is why the highest, ultimate feeling of love delight is inseparably close to mortal fear. The soul has no more place in this body, and on the bed of love, it yearns… How to escape from this yearning? Be a man, that is, an embodied spirit.

People who lead a purely natural life are left with nothing to do once their natural duty – coupling and birth – is fulfilled and the accompanying natural joys are experienced. They are no longer needed by nature. Only something supernatural, i. e. spirit, can fill their lives. Where there is no spirit, a dreary melody of banality begins, for which life revolves around the natural: courtship, coupling, births, first anticipated, then experienced, and finally remembered… This is the path from frivolity to the loss of all semblance of youth, to endless conversations about daily life, and in moments of reflection, to mournful singing: “Each day brings us closer to our grave.” The spirit is also horrified by the grave, but is joyful, always cheerful, as if it already knows that there is no grave for it.

In essence, Rozanov attempted to prove that man’s natural purpose is the only purpose. All his struggles against the Church and Christ were based on this. “Spirit is the true support, the true calling of man,” says the Church. “What is the spirit? I do not understand,” Rozanov replies. “I see tools of copulation and reproduction, but not the spirit.” Rozanov tried to solely transfer the goals and roots of human life back to the earth, to restore man to a natural and purely natural existence. “You speak of spirit, but I see the body. How could you forget the body in your concerns for the spirit?” This is all Rozanov. But pleasure and death are destined for the body… Returning to the natural order of things, Rozanov suffered the appropriate punishment – hence the sadness in his “solitary” books. The sun of nature has set, and the Sun of the Spirit did not shine for him.

Religion

Fighters against the idea of the immortality of the soul defend their right to sin. If the soul is immortal, then sins in this life have an influence on the next life; if not, then do whatever you want! The idea of the immortality of the soul is an idea of personal responsibility, which is why it is fiercely attacked. Materialists see death as a mercy, because it absolves them of their sins: there is no continuation, no consequences. Death for them is an opportunity to escape without paying the bill. Hatred for the idea of the immortality of the soul is exclusively ethical in character.

Faith does not provide peace, as it is commonly thought. The believer feels protected and under the patronage, and at the same time knows that this patronage cannot and should not prevent one from perishing, because defeat and destruction are a natural order of things that no one can escape. Faith in invincibility, invulnerability, and immunity to failure would be non-religious and immoral. It is characteristic of madmen, the possessed, all kinds of blinded people, and ultimately those who live outside of faith precisely because they believe not in God but in themselves and their exceptional destiny. However, the world was not created for the benefit of any particular individual; such faith has no meekness, only exceptional self-love; it is no longer faith, but only a more or less enduring self-deception. Christ did not believe in this way: He preached the good news and knew what this preaching was leading to.

The position of a believer is such that one knows life has a meaning, but one doesn’t know exactly what it is. Faith is not about following specific rules, but about understanding the meaning of life, and not just “life in general,” but specifically one’s own life, with its threats and attractions. In any case, a believer takes the position of an actor and an evaluator. As an actor, one determine one’s own future, and as an evaluator, one determine the value of one’s choices. Needless to say, with this attitude towards one’s life, very little of it appears random or unworthy of attention. The life of a believer consists of a conversation with one’s destiny, that is, with God.

Religious feeling can be expressed in the words: “I am alone – and at the same time not alone, but with a mysterious power that helps me in good and hinders me in evil.” All organized religions only build upon this position, upon the dual feeling of loneliness-not loneliness, abandonment, desolation in the world – and invisible companionship. If only one of these principles, the feeling of abandonment or the feeling of presence, were present in life, there would be no place for religion in it; but only something smaller or greater than religion.

A believer says to oneself: “God puts you in difficult situations, shameful situations, hopeless situations – so that you may work hard, feel shame, and find a way out. Doesn’t this mean that, despite everything, He still values you highly?”

Religion is not the same as “rules of life,” and where there are “rules of life,” there may not necessarily be religion. I am afraid that a positive definition of religion is impossible, just as a positive definition of truth. In any case, rules of life are invented by people and for people. They are completely “this-worldly” and do not extend to the inner life of the soul – to the extent that the inner life of the soul is the threshold of another life. Religion, on the other hand, is not here or not fully here, and its first distinguishing feature is that it does not recognize the visible world as the only and final reality.

Not believing in anything is the same as not loving anything. If human development is crowned with disbelief, it must be said that it is crowned with cruelty and self-love – two common manifestations of the lack of love directed outward. Atheism assumes that either every human action, including the most insignificant and vile one, is truthful and beautiful, or there is no truth and beauty at all, and then there is nothing to care about. The only significant objection to it is that the concepts of truth and beauty are innate to man, that is, they do not depend on one’s mind and imagination. Therefore, the struggle against truth and beauty is a struggle against human nature; ultimately, the struggle against God is the destruction of humanity.

Man whose spiritual path leads through a desert has no more advisors or teachers whose opinions one could accept unquestioningly. On the path of spiritual solitude and self-reliance, one has already come far enough that all other paths are now beyond hills, forests, and the horizon. Any truth for this one can be a reason to reflect, but not more. Whom to ask? Only God, but God always speaks in half-words, never completes them; He is not loquacious. You ask God, and circumstances or your own soul respond, so the task of a believing and solitary, thinking personality is to find the truth in them, taking into account the circumstances and your inner voice, that is, to pay attention to details and depths. No teachers, no advisors. The world, one’s own soul, and nothing more. The sun is burning, the stars are shining, the night is sad – and there is no one else in the world, only us and God.

“God” – isn’t this word too ambiguous? We think about God as He wants us to think about Him. There is no coercive truth. On the contrary, truths compete freely in the world. The universe is a mystery, the solution of which is inherent in it and cannot be expressed in words. Only life, one’s own life with mysteries and revelations, falls and rebirths, leads the individual towards the truth. Those who believe in the completeness and meaning of the universe are given completeness and meaning; those who do not believe will never know them. “The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force,” said Christ. Exactly so. Truth is as much truth as we freely chose it and follow it to the end.

For me, the most natural thought is that God is not as we imagine Him. Our thinking can only have a certain concept of God, just like, for example, an atom; but our thoughts have no access to their inner essence and cannot have. We can only interpret the signs in the sky of the universe in one way or another, speaking in a lofty language, and our knowledge and faith are composed of a set of interpretations. However, in the case of the simplest and most complex, we are dealing solely with our thoughts and perceptions, not with the things that we imagine. This is not new at all, but thoroughly forgotten.

They say, “God loves you!” – I don’t know. I can only think that He exists, and what He is like can only be guessed by reading the script of one’s life. The certainty of beliefs, the clarity and warmth of feeling, I think, take away from the truth about God, and the truth is that He is unfathomable. He is greater than us, and it’s foolish to invest our feelings in our idea of Him. We can only believe – and search for meaning in His actions.

I would even say that one can hope either for chance or for God. My conscious choice, however, is to hope for God, because my life with its values and aspirations is indifferent to chance, and there is no support to be found in chance as the engine of the universe. A meaningful life cannot rest on meaningless foundations. If I find meaning in my existence, I must inevitably find it in the world; “must” not because I “want” to, not on a whim, but by necessity – sufficient acuity of vision and ability to generalize. “Athéisme marque de force d’esprit, mais jusqu’à un certain degré seulement,” [6] says Pascal. The least ability to generalize sees in the world a perfect order in which there is no chance, only the will of the deity; average generalizing power discovers and deifies chance; higher tiers of generalizing power see that the ripple of chance is superimposed on some correct pattern, or one could say: in the ripple of chance on the surface of the universe, there is notice of a rule, a trembling and moving image – the sought-after meaning of existence.

A person certainly needs to feel a connection of this one’s life to something else that is not here and not now. Man craves the unknown and movement, while the soul trembles and languishes in the stationary circle of the known. This urge is satisfied by tradition and, to a much greater extent, religiosity; modern tales about inhabitants of other planets are justified solely by it. One’s own limited life here, without any connection to anything outside of itself, neither before, after, today, nor in eternity, here, or in another place, has no meaning or value. Meaning is given only by connection, by non-solitude; by not falling out of the universal connection of phenomena. As long as we believe in this connection and find it in our life, there is meaning in this life. We need to believe, otherwise our souls will not find peace, that our personal existence here is not accidental, not indifferent, that it is linked to the threads of meaning with the past and the future, and – most importantly! – that it continues beyond the dark horizon of earthly life. Without this, our souls will not find peace.

When hope ceases to be a gift, it becomes a duty. As a form of prayer, it is becomes a religious duty, because the hopeful person as if changes the tension of the world matter, pushes events, turning them sometimes from just probable to possible, from possible to happened, and happened just like that, and not otherwise. Only with this understanding, provided that we see in it something greater than just a phenomenon of spiritual life, hope can be a religious obligation.

When man becomes tired of believing, one just becomes tired of searching for meaning in things, and one’s soul, which may have been in semi-darkness before, now willingly falls into the darkness. Driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge, tempered by the realization of the impossibility of complete understanding, the soul turns to worldly wisdom, i. e. the worship of incomplete knowledge of a few things. “We would like it,” it says, “if the world were like this or that”, and tells with a sad smile about its youthful faith, “but in the world everything is not like that and even completely the opposite, and life is not obliged to conform to our desires.” However, in reality, it’s not life that has deceived them, but they have stopped asking questions prematurely, and worse yet, have begun to act as if negative answers to their questions are already known. An person tired of believing resigns from one’s duty.

The God-spirit is incredibly difficult for humans. We want to worship someone like ourselves. Most of us notice not the spirit, but only the personality, in ourselves and in others. The spirit, as it manifests in us, is the desire to rise up, to more and more purified forms of inner life; purified of the rubbish and contingencies of existence, of animal, pre-human impulses, of the habits of the soul… “Pure flame devours // the imperfection of existence” is the best definition of the spirit’s qualities. Flame, wind, breath, “a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice” – in short, an intangible and formless immaterial force, in relation to which reason and will appear roughly materialistic. A quiet breeze, a gentle whisper, a silent evasion speaking inside of me: “I don’t want to” or, conversely, “It must be so.” Reason – the roar of a drum, will – the stomping of boots, spirit – the swallow in the sky and the ray of light, silent, nameless, moving, weightless “I want this” or “I will not accept this.” This voice is so quiet that even cat’s paws make more noise than it does, but it cannot be argued with: it commands us in a whisper. Only hearing this sacred whisper, do I know that I am alive.

For me, possible and reliable evidence for the existence of God is that without God, humanity can expect a general decline and failure in all endeavors, temporarily enlivened perhaps only by the deceptive fireworks of technological omnipotence, as beautiful as they are dangerous. The divine, I think, is truly human; human in preeminence. Man, in Christian language, is the son of God, son of Truth, and cannot be without it. Every attempt by humanity to free itself from God and the divine within itself leads only to horrors, the destruction of society, family, and personality. Whatever people may think about God, the only answer to godlessness in history is that if religion falls first, then after it comes conscience, and after conscience comes culture. These are all facts, free from any assessment. By forcing the truth, one can mistake the evening twilight for the morning of a new world, as some do… but, in my opinion, an impartial observer should see that we are now paying the bills of revolutions and wars, and even more so of the frivolous and blasphemous philosophy of extreme selfishness in all its forms, from Utilitarianism to Marxism, which has justified the thirst for strength and power inherent in man always, but usually suppressed and corrected by the influence of higher values… “This is not Theology, this is Arithmetic.” History speaks for us.

To not lose the inner light and hope for eternal life, we must strive to be as spiritual beings as possible in this life. Suppressing the spirit, diving into the mundane, verbal, and emotional dirt means the obscuration of this inner light. A pure and elevated soul is like a swept house with open windows to the sun. The light inside does not go out because of external circumstances, but because the soul has become lazy and surrendered to external circumstances. This is “morality,” that is, something abstract and boring, but the feeling aptly called by Weininger the “feeling of death,” [7] is of a definite nature and haunts the soul that is plunged into darkness. It is a sign of betrayal to the spirit and cannot be avoided through the efforts of reason and willpower. “We have no choice but to be spiritual beings; otherwise, it is a dark abyss, an animalistic despair without animalistic joys…” We must serve the spirit without knowing what it is. We must love our soul and marvel at it without being able to define it. In short, we must listen to the unclear and unknown, the indefinite and inexpressible, only because in them, and not in reason and will, lies the source of holiness, purity, beauty, and truth. Without any evidence; simply because with them, there is light, and without them, there is darkness and despair.

The only fruitful theology is anthropology. If we acknowledge that truth, sanctity, and beauty are inherent to the soul, then even in the face of the ruins of an ordered world, in the face of the apparent triumph of meaninglessness, we still have support and hope. The worldview of the godforsaken era claims to possess the most complete and perfect knowledge of human nature, supposedly exploring this nature in its entirety and discovering only a skein of destructive forces. This is where the possibility of a dispute with this groundlessly self-confident time arises. What is truly inherent to the soul? What is truly human?

The tempter says, “Power, violence, and cruelty – is not it because you, humans, have to flee and hide from them that they are your natural tendencies from birth, and in this case, all your morality is only self-deception.” This is a sharp question that must be reckoned with. I think the answer should be as follows: “These are not the tendencies of man, but of the beast in which man is born and walks on the earth. There is no other way to explain the existence of a second row of values – truth, beauty, mercy, and creativity. The beast has nothing to do with truth and beauty!”

Indeed, when speaking of the “true nature” of man, people tend to point out the worst in this one and declare that all that is good is a result of habit and upbringing. This is a lie. The difficulty of man’s moral position lies in the fact that just as the bad is ingrained in one, so too is the good, both are not habit, but nature. Some of us recognize these two sources in our nature, while others, due to their insufferable inclination to reduce everything to a single cause, try to suppress the good in man and present it as a product of coercion, upbringing, and habit. I repeat: where an unbiased view finds two sources, they want to see only one, and to obtain it, they resort to the common violence imposed on facts, predetermined by their personal morality and nothing else. The choice between good and evil always has moral grounds, no matter how loudly it is masked as “disinterested research.”

They desire to see God as rational and moral, specifically in a human sense. A similar branch of atheism draws conclusions without finding human rationality and morality in His actions. In other words, we want God to be like a human, just stronger. If we don’t find human in God, we turn away from Him. However, a profound thinker like Leo Shestov spent a lot of effort clarifying a simple truth: God is not human, and neither reason nor morality – with all their human limitations – can be attributed to Him. It is essential to understand this: reason and morality have nothing divine within them. Reason is simply an ability to solve problems, and morality is solely rules to solve those problems. If we believe in God, we must search for the divine deeper or higher. Otherwise, we face the danger of deifying reason or a cult of morality, which is far from the teaching of the One who said, “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.” Anthropomorphism threatens not only early religious thought but also the thinking of even the most experienced skeptic. “I suppose,” says such a skeptic, “that God could not have allowed this or that if He existed.” Do you feel the mistake? As frightening as it may be to say, God is neither rational nor moral. To assume that He is “rational” or “moral” is absurdly… To follow Him means not to be the first pupil in the school of laws and commandments, but to be a human in the fullness of humanity, only without harm to one’s soul. Saying this, I understand that I have in no way clarified matters but only paraphrased the Sermon on the Mount: “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way.” What to do! The thinker himself can only hint at what he only glimpses.

Herzen resented Jenseits [8] not because he was persuaded by Feuerbach, but because he was superficial enough not to find anything otherworldly within himself. For if another world was not present within us, talk of the otherworldly would remain mere words, having no power. And Christ said, “the kingdom of God is within you,” meaning it can be touched, it is not so alien to our world. The whole question is a matter of the subtlety of hearing and the spiritual disposition of the individual—whether one hears, whether one allows oneself to hear the voice from the depths. For instance, the self-awareness of creative persons, which clearly speaks of the “duplication of the self,” of the presence within them, besides their individuality, of someone else, whom they call either muse or soul – this too can be rejected simply because it is not accessible to everyone. But inspiration and the sense of the second creative “self” exist independently of our attitude to them. The same is true of Jenseits. Read Nabokov – this seemingly irreligious writer talks a lot, if only in passing, about the sense of insight into the other side of the colorful fabric of being. Look into “The Gift:” “all this skein of random thoughts, like everything else as well the seams and sleaziness of the spring day, the ruffle of the air, the coarse, variously intercrossing threads of confused sounds – was but the reverse side of a magnificent fabric, on the front of which there gradually formed and became alive images invisible to him.” A real, profound poet cannot help feeling this; one can only be uncertain about interpreting one’s feelings. In Nabokov’s words: “It is certainly not then – not in dreams – but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”

Some derive religious faith from the psychological need for self-comfort. Quite the opposite. In order to fully live the so-called “real life,” to enjoy its benefits and endure its disappointments, it is necessary to have certainty that this life is the last and final one, i. e. something directly opposed to religious faith. Without this certainty, most worldly victories will lose their sweetness, and many defeats will lose their bitterness; both will become only insignificant events on the path. However, since man defends one’s own significance, at least the significance of his actions, from all attacks, one is inclined to defend oneself against the thought that everything here is not final. Despite the fact that religion, philosophy, and poetry are tolerated (or rather, were tolerated) in society, certain hours and places were assigned for them, so that they do not meet at another time and in another place. Religion was given Sunday; philosophy obtained the lecture hall in the university; and poetry… poetry had influence over youth (which, however, is also in the past – in the era we are experiencing of understanding man as a thinking muscle). [9] But life passes by them. In relation to this state of “practical faith,” religious faith is not a narcotic, but an awakening, the highest degree of clarity. Life does not urge us towards religion, but towards accepting all that exists as the last and decisive reality; religion comes amidst our performance, takes the cardboard sword from our hands and says, “Wake up!”

For a person who wants to preserve one’s soul, the most important thing is not to stand on any “firm point” in life. Standing on such a “firm point” marks the beginning of a fall: self-complacency, coarsening of the character, and “induration of the heart”, and the being partly earthly and partly heavenly becomes entirely earthly. For some, nothing is more tempting, while for others nothing is worse than a life that “stands firmly on the ground.” Though it may be solid and strong, it is entirely based on perishable things. The life of culture and spirit appears unsubstantial compared to this earthly stability, but only it can lead a person to something more enduring than one’s physical body. Only someone who does not set up a home for oneself, hopes for the coming Jerusalem – only this one remains in history. Every firmly constructed home is the tomb of its creator, possibly examined with curiosity by future generations – but nothing more.

2004, 2023

[1] This was pointed out by Weininger.

[2] Nietzsche.

[3] Khodasevich.

[4] It’s as if this writer had never truly been in love and had never seen the realm of emotions and soulful attachments in relationships between men and women – that sweet cloud that surrounds the loving ones. Without this sweet cloud, love really becomes just satisfying sexual desire.

[5] Our attitude towards the book should be the same. The book is also a temple of the soul and the grave of its creator. Disrespect for the book is the last respect that can be shown to an author, it is an insult to one’s soul.

[6] “Atheism is a mark of strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.”

[7] “The life of the soul begins with the realization of the Self, although this life is often interrupted by periods filled with the most horrible feeling, the feeling of death.”

[8] Otherworldly (German).

[9] Thanks to Vladimir Nabokov for the definition.

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