The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 2/Chapter 5
Nietzsche wrote of religion disparagingly as an intoxicant, and yet by his own religion he was intoxicated. No one ever acted more strangely or became more excited under the influence of personal religion than Nietzsche. It is no reproach to religion that it changes reasonable beings to emotional beings. And yet there is associated with religion a false emotionalism and sentimentalism that we call morbidity, a desire to be miserable and to make other people miserable, a wearing of weeds on festival days, pessimism and "God grant we may all be as well two months hence," a living with death and a loving of the gruesome.
Gloominess is a danger for the Slav soul as with us it is for the Celtic. The bright energy of the Teuton is lacking. It is not worth while making things or working for position. The mind is free and questioning. There is no sense of—
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws
Makes that and the action fine,
The trivial round, the common task,
Will furnish all we ought to ask.
Nature is "vainly sweet," and the eye looks out on the recurring pageant of the seasons with unutterable ennui and sadness. And in life the petty circumstances, if congenial, are but playfully pleasant, but if uncongenial, seem surcharged with malice.
The river that runs through life is easily dammed, floods the whole being of a man, and becomes stagnant, whilst poisonous mists lower over him. The joyful current ceases.
It is a common disaster in Russia, the falling into a morbid state. A Russian poet writes:
All earthly perishes, thy mother and thy boyhood.
Thy wife betrays thee, yea, and friends forsake;
But learn, my friend, to taste a different sweetness
Looking to the cold and Arctic seas.
Get in thy ship, set sail for the far Pole,
And live midst walls of ice. Gently forget
How there you loved and struggled;
Forget the passions of the land behind thee;
And to the shudderings of gradual cold
Accustom thy tired soul,
So that of all she left behind her here
She craveth nought whatever,
When thence to thee floods forth the beams of light celestial,
which is a beautiful poem written for those who have become morbid. It is a beloved poem, and you may come across it written laboriously and exquisitely on tinted paper. But those who read it and love it will never "step into the ship, set sail for the far Pole"; it is not an invitation to join Shackleton, not even figuratively. It is for those who love and nurse their sorrows. They have not the power nor the wish to move. They are transfixed by mournful ideas, ideas that sing through the air as they come, like arrows, and yet console as with music. As another poet (Brussof) writes:
On a lingering fire you burn and burn away,
O my soul,
On a lingering fire you burn and burn away
With sweet moan.
You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows,
Without strength to breathe,
You stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows
In shoulder and breast.
Your enemies around you look on with mirth
Bending the bow,
Your enemies around you look on with mirth
Increasing the woe.
So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently
In the eventide,
So burns the funeral pyre, the arrows stinging gently
For the last time,
which indicates a favourite mood in Russian poetry. Students say such poetry over to one another in their rooms of an evening, teachers in provincial towns say such verses to their women friends, local journalists talk of them, gentle souls of either sex take down the book from the shelf and turn to the familiar page and live with the poet's pain. Such is the melancholy of the cultured, a morbid yet touching melancholy. It is refined. The thoughts are scented, and it is literature and not life which is lending some one expression. But lower down in society, where there is less reading, life itself gives the terms of this outlook. So the coffin-maker in Tchekhof's story—"Rothschild's Fiddle"—has a ledger in which he notes down at the end of each day the losses of the day. All life expresses itself to him in losses, terrible, terrible losses. Smerdyakof, Dostoieffsky's most morbid conception, catches cats and hangs them at midnight with a ceremony and ritual of his own invention.
The old beggar pilgrim sings with cracked voice as he trudges through wind and rain:
I will go up on the hi-igh mounta-ain
And look into the mi-ighty de-ep,
A-and see about me a-all the earth
Where I fre-et and ve-ex my soul.
Ah, Eternity, it is but The-e I se-ek,
Little gra-ave, my little gra-a-a-a-ve,
You are my e-everla-asting ho-ome.
Yellow sand my be-ed,
Stones my ne-eigh-bours,
Wo-orms my fri-ends,
The da-amp earth my mo-other,
Mo-other, my mo-other.
Take me to e-e-ternal re-est.
O Lord have me-e-e-e-ercy![1]
Indeed, many such examples might be adduced to show the pre-occupation of the Russian with the idea of death. The funeral service music is favourite popular music. In the procession of moods in the soul of the young man he comes comparatively rapidly to "worms my neighbours." The excessive number of suicides in Russia may be explained by the extraordinary liability of the Russian soul to falling into a morbid state.
But we are all of us, even the merriest hearts that "go all the way," subject to morbid moods, to fits of depression, black hours when we are ready to deny the world, our ambition in it, our own life, our greatest happiness, and live wilfully in an atmosphere of grief and pessimism, loving sorrow for its own sake, lamenting for the sake of lamentation. We love what Dostoieffsky calls self-laceration. We must every month or so deliver ourselves up to Giant Despair and be cudgelled.
The darker the night the clearer the stars,
The deeper the sorrow the nearer to God,
says a Russian proverb, but these recurrent moods are not really sorrow, they are a being morbid. They have nothing in common with the suffering that comes from destiny itself, nothing of the circumstances of going into the wilderness, or taking the road with the burden on one's back, nothing of the pangs of new birth, of the podvig.
Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Toiling and waiting for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
—Who never ate his bread in real sorrow. Life is of this sort, that if you will stake all of it for a new life you will get the new life. But when you really do give up all the old and dear, that is a dark and terrible hour, the hour of renunciation, of the podvig.
And on the road of life itself there is a great gulf between the vigorous and Teutonic "Welcome each rebuff that turns earth smoothness rough" and the morbid and Oscar Wildean "living with sorrow," a great gulf between Father Seraphim kneeling a thousand days on a rock, and the sad "intelligent" who reads to himself in the evening hour:
To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows,
Without strength to breathe,
To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows
In shoulder and breast.
Tolstoy in his later years was morbid. I suppose if the psychology of Tolstoy's life were to be followed out we should be surprised at the frequent recurrence of morbid and despondent moods. Nothing seems more characteristic of his later years than fruitless quarrelling with the life of Yasnaya Polyana, threatening to run away, lamentations, self-lacerations. But now and again in relief Tolstoy did actually flee. He took the road to Moscow to live like a simple artisan and earn his living by carpentering, or he set off for a monastery where some famous monk lived in his cell, and sought relief by confession and Christian intercourse.
That going forth on the road, a-seeking new life, is characteristic. At times one would think half Russia is on the road. Utility has been flung aside, the chances of gain have been passed over, the so-called duty to work and fulfil your place in the state has been flung to the winds, and the Russian is out on the dusty road, wearing out his boots, thinking, trudging, praying, recognising—finding what his soul desires. That is not morbidity, but a noble form of life.
And many promise themselves wholly to God and enter monasteries or convents, and there find happiness, the bright ray of destiny they sought with their eyes in a dark world.
Every morning, noon, and night
Praise God! says Theocrite
—that is not a morbid life, though a life of denial. It does not mean that every one who would live well should enter a monastery or a convent, it only means that some one whose soul craved such a life has found his way. How we have suffered in England from the difficulty of giving one's soul to God in that way. Those who would have been monks and sisters have had to give themselves in other ways. There are thousands of other ways. Every one who is living well has found a way. The way meant renunciation, hardship, sorrow—but not morbid sorrow, the sorrow which leaves you as you were, as the cloud of gnats wailing by the tree and the stream leave the tree, leave the stream, just as they were, just what they were.
The differentiation between morbid sorrow and real sorrow, between self-laceration and the tribulation that comes of destiny, is important if we would understand aright what the Russian means by the "Religion of Suffering."
The religion of suffering, of which so much is said, is a term easily misunderstood, meaning differently in the mouths of different people. The political propagandist holds that the Russian people are melancholy because their institutions are so bad, and that the religion of suffering is the religion of revolution, a growing resentment against the government.
The morbid Russian will say that the religion of suffering is the knowledge of the truth that only in suffering and near to death can you understand anything about life. He will deny that anything else can teach you.
The peasant pilgrim will interpret it as the religion of taking to the road and bearing the cross; being a beggar for Christ's sake; refusing a lift on the road to the Sepulchre, holding that where Christ walked it is not for them to ride.
Another will say it is the religion that helps you to face suffering, and point to Tolstoy's story of the death of Ivan Ilyitch. Ivan Ilyitch was a man who had no religion, and had never faced suffering in his life, an ordinary bourgeois of the type of lower intelligentsia, jovial, selfish, cynical, fond of cards and of his dinner, and having no other particular interest in life except an ambition to make more money. Suddenly he is stricken with cancer, and lives for years in increasing pain till at last he dies in agony. He has no spiritual comfort; pain quite o'ercrows his spirit. The truth is, no pain really conquers the spirit, the spirit always triumphs at the last, even if the body is rendered useless by the struggle. But this truth is lost in the irreligion of Ivan Ilyitch. It would seem it would have been better if he had lived a more regular and healthy life in his youth, but that is a false moral. The fact is he had never faced the solemn mystery of life, never taken his ordinary human share in suffering, and so was lost in the hour of pain. But perhaps there were more spiritual gleams in the end of Ivan Ilyitch than Tolstoy tells us of. Tolstoy was a moralist. But in any case Ivan Ilyitch presents a contrast to a religious Russian on his death-bed, in his last agony, gripping tight in his hand a little wooden cross, his eyes upon the ikon of his patron saint before which the candle is burning.
Another will say, the religion of suffering is that which helps you to face life, which is perhaps another way of saying that it is the religion which helps you to face death . . . the religion which prompts you to take risks and will face no dangers. He is losing his soul. In a great war he wakens up and offers himself—and saves his soul. Or in the ordinary course of things, in the "weak piping times of peace," he resolves to make a leap in the dark and get life, he gives up the old for the new—he saves his soul, and out of his sufferings springs a glory.
Still it is not for every one to make this leap in the dark. Villagers, the peasants of a countryside, have obviously no call that way, or seldom a call that way. They have not the need that the townsman has, they have satisfying visions of truth, from nature, in their way of life, in their traditional customs. Brand was probably wrong trying to lead his village flock up among the glaciers and avalanches to make a church of ice. He should have preached such sermons and made such appeals in towns. He would have led people from the towns. Nevertheless there has been a cult of Brand in Russia, especially since Ibsen's long drama was produced at the Theatre of Art, and many divinity students and young priests have been touched by his vigorous onslaught on the quiet lives of simple folk.
On the other hand, there have not been wanting vigorous opponents to Brand and the "God of the Heights," and I have even seen the scientist working to relieve pain put in opposition to Brand working to increase the pain and sorrow in the world. But in that opposition lies a misconception. Crucifixion under chloroform does not conquer death and sin, and there is no sleeping-draught for the young man on the threshold of life who has got to dare and suffer and die many times before he emerges at his noblest and richest.
Dostoieffsky voiced the religion of suffering for Russia, he suffered himself, and in his personal suffering discovered the national passion. He sanctified Siberia, redeeming the notion of it from that of a foul prison and place of punishment to a place of redemption, and finding one's own soul. He did not find Siberia an evil place, but on the contrary, found it holy ground. These men came face to face with reality who had lived till then in an atmosphere of unreality. The roads of Siberia were roads of pilgrimage. Dostoieffsky sent successively his two most interesting heroes to tread those roads—Raskolnikof and Dmitri Karamazof. Tolstoy develops and materialises the idea in the story of Katya and Neludof.
Then in his novels Dostoieffsky generally shows the suffering ones, never suggesting the idea that the suffering should be removed. He has no interest in the non-suffering normal person. He prefers a man who is torn, whose soul is disclosed and bare. He feels that such a man knows more, and that his life can show more of the true pathos of man's destiny. Such people think, dream, pray, hope, they are infinitely lovable, they are clearly mortal. Hence a pre-occupation with suffering, a saying yes to suffering when the obvious answer seems to be no, and Let this cup pass from me. It is perhaps because the West has taken it for granted that suffering is an evil thing, and has set itself consciously the task of eliminating suffering from the world that the East has emphasised its acceptance of suffering. Nietzsche noted what he called the watchword of Western Europe—"We wish that there may be nothing more to fear." He despised that wish. The East does not despise the wish, but finds it necessary to affirm its own belief more vigorously. It accepts many things which the West considers wrong in themselves—War, Disease, Pain, Death.
- ↑ Cited by the priest Florensky, who copied down the song as he heard it (The Pillar and Foundation of Truth).