The Miracle of the Resurrection. -Bp. Mikhail (Semyonov)

There are two ways to live: Completely lawfully and respectably, walking upon dry land—measuring, weighing, foreseeing. But one can also walk upon the waters. Then it is impossible to measure or foresee, and one must only believe at all times. A moment without faith—and you begin to sink. — Mother Maria (Skobtsova)

On Bishop Mikhail From the Krotov Library, courtesy of M. Roshchin – 2008 The Old Believer bishop Mikhail (in the world: Pavel Vasilievich Semenov) was born in 1873 into the family of a peasant-cantonist in the Simbirsk province. In 1899, Hieromonk Mikhail graduated from the Kazan Theological Academy, and in 1902, after brilliantly defending his dissertation, he was transferred to the St. Petersburg Theological Academy as a privatdozent in the department of canon law. Just a year later, Father Mikhail was elevated to the rank of archimandrite and received the title of extraordinary professor. Much displeased the young professor in the Synodal Orthodoxy of the time. He did not conceal his views and always spoke openly. For his disagreements and critical remarks, Archimandrite Mikhail was dismissed from the Academy in 1906 and exiled to the Zadonsk Monastery. There he rethought his life’s path and decided to convert to Old Belief. On October 23, 1907, Archimandrite Mikhail was received into the Old Orthodox Church (Belokrinitskaya hierarchy). The rite of reception was performed by Bishop Innokenty of Nizhny Novgorod. “Even as a student, I loved you as brothers. Your sufferings were dear and close to me. My soul longed to embrace you. And now I have come to you. Receive me, then, as a brother,” — said Father Mikhail in one of his sermons in 1907. On November 22, 1908, Archimandrite Mikhail was consecrated as Bishop of Canada. He did not have a functioning diocese and lived by literary work. He collaborated with various Old Believer periodicals and, in less than ten years, authored dozens of spiritual articles. Bishop Mikhail was given the grace-filled gift of church preaching—not the gift of a philosopher or thinker, but that of a preacher by the mercy of God. In the autumn of 1982, when I had the opportunity to work in the personal library of Ivan Nikiforovich Zavoloko and converse at length with this remarkable and perceptive collector of Old Believer rarities, I heard from him these words: “Bishop Mikhail was an extraordinary spiritual writer. No one in contemporary Old Belief knew how to write as he did.” Such high praise of the spiritual feat of an Old Believer enlightener is truly precious. The writings of Bishop Mikhail are scattered throughout the pages of early 20th-century Old Believer periodicals. The work now offered to the reader, “The Miracle of the Resurrection,” was first published in the Old Believer journal Church (1908, no. 15). It is a short spiritual prose poem, a bright and joyful hymn to truth, sung by a pure soul. In the early 1900s, Bishop Mikhail was an active participant in the meetings of the Religious-Philosophical Society in St. Petersburg, initiated by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius. The discourse of the Russian religious renaissance of the early 20th century is clearly visible in The Miracle of the Resurrection. In this and other spiritual writings, Bishop Mikhail skillfully synthesizes the insights of contemporary religious thinkers with the deep, living faith characteristic of Old Belief. Certainly, The Miracle of the Resurrection bears the stamp of its era. But this only enhances the value of the article’s inner meaning for us today—the fervent faith that inspired the author, and the compelling logic of his not immediately evident conclusions. Bishop Mikhail lived Orthodoxy. He perceived its dogmas as the spiritual axis upon which everything in the world depends. He regarded the dogma of the Holy Trinity as especially vital—the metaphysical foundation of Christianity as a religion of love. In his article Do We Need Dogmas?, Bishop Mikhail wrote: “Yes, if the truth of the Trinity were to enter our life like a wedge, into our understanding of life, the face of the world would be changed, and Christ’s Kingdom would come upon the earth. Love would become the law of life… If a man lives in spirit in the air of the heavenly spheres, then he learns to truly believe—not only with his mind, but also with his will to approach the truth of revelation and enter within it. Then the dogmas reveal themselves to him in his inner feeling, in the depths of his moral consciousness. And only then will the Holy Trinity cease to appear to him as a geometrical triangle, and instead be revealed in the light of its spiritual content—both as a revelation of the inner life of God and as a commandment illuminating the entire path of the Christian.” Bishop Mikhail’s earthly journey ended tragically. On October 18, 1916, he was severely beaten in Moscow by unknown assailants and brought to the hospital unconscious. Only several days later did he regain consciousness and state his name. On October 24, he confessed and received Holy Communion in the hospital. When the priest brought the Holy Cross to his lips, he took it in his right hand and pressed it to his mouth for a long time. On October 27, 1916, the noble heart of Bishop Mikhail ceased to beat.

Bishop Mikhail (Semenov)

THE MIRACLE OF THE RESURRECTION

I The Resurrection of Christ is a historical fact. In this case, we possess every kind of evidence for the reality of the event: the Lord Jesus Christ died. That is the undeniably certain first half. There have been attempts to claim that the Lord was only in a swoon, that He was taken down from the cross faint from suffering and blood loss, but still alive. Supposedly, while in the tomb, He revived due to the scent of the spices or the cold of the grave and left the tomb. But setting aside the compelling objection of Strauss (an enemy of Christianity)—that a weak and powerless sufferer could not have made upon the apostles the impression of a conqueror of death—let us look from the standpoint of the believers. We can cite one fact as confirmation. The Gospels say that from the pierced side of the Lord came forth blood and water. If unbelievers do not wish to consider this a miracle, as we do, then they must at least see in it the clearest proof. From the perspective of natural science, such a phenomenon would indicate heart failure—that is, certain death. So then, Christ died. And for unbelievers this is even more convincingly proven than for believers. Next comes the second fact, no less certain: His body was no longer in the tomb. That this fact is indisputable is evidenced by the Jewish Talmud, which repeats the old tale that the disciples stole Christ’s body. Thus, the body disappeared. What happened? Perhaps the disciples really did steal it. But this thought is entirely inadmissible, no matter how bold the deniers may be. One must consider the rapturous ecstasy that seized the apostles after the resurrection, the transformation that suddenly turned them from cowards into the strong. If the resurrection had been their invention, could such a miraculous transformation have taken place in their souls? So, the body disappeared in some extraordinary way. What happened? I call on witnesses: they will tell us what happened there at the tomb in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea. The witnesses of the resurrection are the apostles. They say that in the cave, where the dead man had been, they saw only messengers of the resurrection. They speak of the Lord’s appearance to five hundred at the Sea of Galilee, of His appearance to the eleven apostles, to the twelve, and so on. What can be said against their testimony? Some tried to discredit the witnesses. It was said they were hallucinating, that they saw the Lord only in visions, because they were expecting and longing for a miracle. But read the Gospels. Is it true that they were expecting it? Was there any basis for seeing what was not, for hallucinating? In order to be deceived, to see what is not there, one must expect the Risen One, believe that His resurrection is near and certain. But which of the apostles had such faith? When Mary Magdalene and the other women went to the tomb, they wondered: “Who shall roll away the stone for us?” When Mary saw the tomb empty, the thought of resurrection did not even occur to her. Even when she saw the Lord, she did not recognize Him. Why? Because she was convinced that the dead do not rise. And the apostles? When they were told, “He is alive, He is risen,” they “believed not.” Thomas did not believe, even when he saw. Could such people, who had no thought of the possibility of resurrection and who were not expecting a miracle, have hallucinated and imagined the resurrection? Therefore, they truly saw the Risen One. The historical fact of the resurrection is undeniable. In the West, many scholarly men devoted the labor of their lives to refuting the miracles of Jesus and His resurrection. They are called rationalists. But with all their intellect and erudition, they were unable to shake the Gospel account and, over three centuries, have done nothing but refute one another—and at times even openly admit their own impotence in contending against Christ. Thus, the German scholar De Wette, who for decades led the rationalist school, confessed on his deathbed that “the event of the resurrection, though the manner of its accomplishment is shrouded in impenetrable darkness, is nevertheless as certain as the death of Caesar.” When the semi-rationalist Neander read this confession of De Wette, tears gushed from his eyes. After this, Neander undertook a new thorough investigation of the historical proofs and likewise accepted them. In conclusion to this chapter—a final word. We have said that the highest confirmation of the fact of the resurrection is that tremendous transformation which it produced in the apostles. Dreams could not have produced such a change. But the very same fact, in its echo, upholds the development of culture over two thousand years. Could it have been sustained by the dream of twelve visionaries? Here are the words of one scholar on the subject: “‘He is risen, He is alive!’—These words,” writes Pfeffengoefer, “mark the starting point of a new life in the hearts of the disciples. They transform their sorrow into extraordinary joy, inspire courage into their fallen spirits, and make of poor fishermen teachers and preachers of the whole world. Beyond that, they changed all of history. No other fact has left such a deep imprint upon history as this one. Without it, there would be no Christianity and no Christian culture. The history of the world would have taken an entirely different course. Without the living power of the Christian faith, the ancient world would have rotted away, and there would have been no new and rich culture of the Christian world. We cannot believe that sheer imagination could bring about something so great and good. Faith in divine providence demands that the Resurrection of Christ was not a mere appearance, but truth itself.” II Alongside the historical foundation of the fact, let us present another kind of foundation. We might call it psychological. We consider it necessary not because it confirms the resurrection—this fact already stands firm—but because it reveals the deep meaning of the event. As is well known, Kant, the greatest of all thinkers through the ages, regarded the best proof of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul to be this: that our moral consciousness necessarily demands the acknowledgment of these two truths. But in just the same way that our consciousness demands the recognition of the soul’s immortality, so too does our mind require faith in the resurrection. “I imagine,” says Versilov in The Adolescent, “that the battle is over, and the struggle has subsided. After curses, clods of mud, and whistles—there came a stillness, and men were left alone, as they had wished: the great former idea (God) had abandoned them; the great source of strength, which until now had nourished and warmed them, receded like that majestic, beckoning sun in a painting by Claude Lorrain—but this was already like the last day of mankind. And people suddenly understood that they were entirely alone, and at once they felt a great orphanhood… I could never imagine people being thankless or stupefied. Bereft, they would at once draw closer to one another, more tightly and tenderly; they would grasp hands, realizing that now only they themselves remained, and each was all in all to the other. The great idea of immortality would be gone, and they would need to replace it; and all the immense store of former love for Him who had been Immortality would be turned toward nature, toward the world, toward man, toward every little blade of grass. They would come to love the earth and life irresistibly, and in the measure that they came to understand their own transience and finality… They would begin to notice and discover in nature such phenomena and mysteries as they had never even imagined before, for they would look at nature with new eyes—with the gaze of a lover upon his beloved. They would wake up and hurry to kiss one another, rushing to love, knowing that the days are short, that this is all they have left. They would work for one another, and each would give everything of himself to all others, and would be happy in that alone… My faith is small, I am a deist, a philosophical deist (that is, I reject God’s involvement in the affairs of the world—Bishop Mikhail)… but it is remarkable that I always ended my picture with a vision, like Heine’s, of ‘Christ upon the Baltic Sea.’ I could not do without Him; I could not help imagining Him, finally, among the orphaned people. He would come to them, stretch out His hands, and say: ‘How could you forget Him?’ And then it would be as if a veil fell from all eyes, and there would rise a great ecstatic hymn of a new and final resurrection…” (Dostoevsky) Here is a remarkable testimony: an unbeliever arrives at the idea of the resurrection of Christ, at the thought that it is necessary to believe in this resurrection. Why? Quite simply—because he feels in the depths of his soul that life is immediately extinguished if the resurrection is rejected; all is darkened. He feels it is a lie, he says, to think that love is still possible then—nothing will remain but death. Life too often looks at man through the eyes of a corpse, the eyes of Andreev’s Eleazar, risen from the grave (Leonid Andreev’s story “Eleazar”)—those terrible eyes before which all life withers, bridegrooms become old men, the blush fades from youthful cheeks, the sun itself is extinguished, and the blue sky turns dark. And man is left with no way out between two alternatives: to acknowledge life as a decaying corpse that already “stinketh,” and to perish; or else to reject, to drive away the dreadful shadow of “Nothing” with its motionless eyes, and to confront it with another, radiant idea—the idea of the Risen Man, the idea of the invincibility of man. Versilov speaks falsely when he imagines that men could go on living once they have decided that tomorrow the sun will not rise, that man is doomed to a dull and slavish today, with no radiant, divine tomorrow—no bright, sunlit day in a new kingdom. Then men would look at life not as at a beloved, but as at the corpse of one plague-stricken—though perhaps they would feast in desperation amid the revelry of death. In Andreev’s story Eleazar, Augustus gives the order to put out the eyes of the risen Lazarus, because while they looked upon the world, the sun darkened and life withered. But how can one extinguish the dead eyes of our doubt and despair about the world and life? Only by placing beside Eleazar another Risen One—an image who, with His boundless faith in the triumph of life and in the victory of man, will erase the deathly shadow cast by Eleazar. Hence, the moral imperative compels us to believe in the Resurrection; it demands and unrelentingly yearns for this faith. The rejection of this faith causes a true collapse of the entire moral life of man. Indeed, let us fully weigh the consequences to which this unbelief inevitably leads. If Christ did not rise, we are forced to accept something unnatural—namely, that the Pharisees and Sadducees were right, and the Son of Man was wrong. For He grounded His right to divine dignity before them on the claim that He would rise again on the third day. If He rose, His witness is true; if not, then He was a deceiver. Worse still: we are compelled to believe that the tormented sense of God-forsakenness, which for a moment came upon Him as He hung on the Cross, was unjustified, and that the luminous, joyful upward gaze that followed was a delusion. That to His prayerful cry, “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit!” God should have answered: “Perish!” That to Him, who had dedicated His entire life to doing the will of God, to serving God, the same lot would have been given as to the blaspheming criminal. That lofty hope would have been rejected with cruelty. The Pharisees triumphed—and God was present and sealed their victory! If one rejects the Resurrection, one must also reject the Righteous, the Holy God. One can no longer believe in the victory of good in this world if Jesus perished just as Judas did. With the rejection of this one fact, faith in a moral world order—this indispensable condition for any moral striving toward oneself and others—is inevitably overthrown. “If Christ be not risen, then our faith is in vain.” And not only our faith, but also our hope, and our love. If Christ did not rise, then He was justly crucified, for He deceived humanity with the greatest of all lies—declaring that God is the Heavenly Father, that God permitted the destruction in death of such a Person, more valuable than the whole world. Then He is not the Father, not God, and the world is nothing but a mockery of man by the devil—nature itself becomes madness, a curse, and chaos (D. S. Merezhkovsky). Is moral life even possible? Is the struggle against evil possible if Christ is not risen, if He was defeated and did not overcome evil? If Christ did not rise, then faith in His word, in His Gospel, is impossible. Then, as Dostoevsky says, cannibalism follows—anthropophagy. Then the struggle for existence must be accepted as the sole law of life. Indeed, life affirms that the law of existence is struggle, that self-sacrifice is even immoral (as Spencer says). But the Lord Christ affirms that the law of life is struggle—not for one’s own, but for another’s existence. Whom then should we follow? If Christ is not risen, if He is not God, then where is truth? If Christ is just a man, then surely we must admit that the words of these high priests of knowledge are true, and consequently, along with the belief that the cross leads to resurrection, the ideas of self-sacrifice, love, and spiritual life also collapse. Some say that love of neighbor gives pleasure in itself. Yes—but only if one again believes in the victory of that love. Otherwise, love becomes a great torment. Christ’s love is not the pale, middling love preached by, for instance, L. N. Tolstoy, for whom (in his own words) love of enemies is meaningless and impossible. This is the surrender of the entire body and soul, of all conscience—a complete Golgotha-like fusion with mankind in its suffering. How then can such love be borne without the help of the Risen Conqueror? For love to be meaningful, it must yield a definite result, lead to a definite goal; it must increase, even by a jot, the total sum of happiness on earth. What then will one who does not believe in the victorious power of the Cross find in love? Nothing. The goal of serving another—to achieve one’s own happiness and that of one’s neighbor—is unreachable outside faith in the victory of the Cross, in the Resurrection. Suppose I love, and wish to serve another—can I be happy, and make him happy? But think: what am I to do with the sufferings of the millions around me, who cry out in vain, “How long, O Lord?”—those tears all around us, which have been wept, and are being wept, and which have soaked the earth down to its core? They will not permit either me or the other to be happy. One cannot hide from these sufferings or refuse to see them. One cannot console oneself with the thought that though millions suffer, I have made one person a little happier. That would be absurd—and a deliberate sentimental lie to oneself. Suppose I wipe away the tears of one man—then I shall be joyful with his joy and tormented with the sorrow of the whole world. A small plus against a vast minus. And can one even make one person happy, if there is no hope of overcoming suffering altogether? Let me wipe away another’s tears. But why this cruelty? I will save him from the fire in which he burns, from the fire of his personal sufferings. Yet his heart will bleed when, free of his own torment, he beholds the “wounds and griefs” of others. Let me even forget those distant sufferings—but to hope that service to another will shield my eyes from the world’s pain—is that not a cowardly escape from that very pain? For a man to live and labor, he must be sure that evil is conquerable in general, that even the innocent tears of children have an end and a reconciliatory resolution, that each person’s suffering is not something final, unredeemable. If this is not so, then the tears of just one child are enough to burn through the heart, to kill it, to make powerless anyone who has not ceased to be a human being. That is why Ivan Karamazov is right when he says: if everything ends in this life, then it is impossible to love and serve man—such service becomes meaningless—and the only thing left to a man is to drive away compassion with orgies, to intoxicate himself, and when the pursuit of pleasure no longer brings pleasure, to dash his cup to the ground. And progress? Can people live and work for a future when suffering shall cease on earth, when the Kingdom of God shall come? Of course, this Tolstoyan Kingdom of God will never come to earth—but even if it did, every person with a truly human heart would return their ticket for entry to that kingdom. Everyone would have to say, as Ivan Karamazov says: “What is the good of this harmony, when those who paid for it will not partake of it—when they will never be clothed in white robes, nor given palm branches? They say,” he tells Alyosha, “that everyone must suffer to buy eternal harmony—but why must children suffer? I renounce all harmony if it is bought at such a price. It is not worth the tears, not even of that one little girl from the Gei-Market. Not worth it—because her tears remain, and will remain, unredeemed, unrequited. I do not accept harmony—not out of hatred for mankind, but out of love. The price is too high—it is beyond what I can pay. And so I return my ticket to Him. Not that I do not accept God, Alyosha—I just respectfully give back the ticket.” “That is rebellion,” Alyosha replies. “Yes, it is rebellion. But to stop short of this rebellion is possible only for either a poor, stunted, unchristian soul, content with a small, gray half-love—or a soul that believes that children’s tears not only are not left unredeemed, but themselves are redemption, and that in the age to come they shall be turned into a crown of diamonds. That to their cry, ‘How long, O Lord?’ the sufferers shall receive an answer.” Without doubt, only in the acknowledgment of the truth that the Cross is followed by the Resurrection, that Christ who suffered is also the risen God, lies the resolution of all tormenting and seemingly insoluble questions. Christ has conquered suffering—and if that is so, then my service to my neighbor is not the toil of Sisyphus or the Danaids, endlessly pouring into a bottomless vessel with no hope of ever truly making man happy, but rather a participation in the work of Christ, which shall find its completion in the Kingdom of God’s Love and Glory. From this perspective, to suffer with others and for others, to give them one’s life in compassion, means to lay the stones of mankind’s true and eternal happiness. And only this thought—that we are building the good of ourselves and all humanity together, and under the guidance of the Great Architect, Christ God, who has overcome the world—can make the suffering of this life truly a joy. At the same time, only this confidence—that the sufferings of this world are preparing us and our neighbors for the joy of life with God, that the future will not only cause the sufferers to forget the past, but will compel them to bless it, as the path to joy and happiness—can reconcile our minds with the sight of suffering, and in particular, with the sufferings of children. III “But in that case,” some will say, “you are proving the truth of the resurrection by your desire to believe it. Mere desire is not proof.” Of course. But the point here is not simply desire. The essence is that the death of Him who preached in Galilee and died on Golgotha is not made impossible merely by the wish to believe in His resurrection, but by rational thought itself: such a man cannot die—His death is contrary to reason, it cannot be accepted by reason. We must remember that every death is, in its essence, unnatural and violent. Think about it. A tree grows, reaches a certain age, and begins to decay—finally, it dies. The same is true for animals. But is that really natural? Why does the turning toward death begin at a certain point? It is inexplicable… and the explanation is found in the entrance of sin into the world, of rot—worms eat away at the tree, its sap dries up, and decay enters the animal world. Even if we consider the death of trees and animals as natural, there still remains the possibility of imagining the immortality of the organism. It has been established that the cells that make up the organism can be immortal, capable of constantly renewing themselves and restoring their strength (Armand Sabatier). This means that an organism untouched by rot ought to be immortal. The cells of the organism, forever strong and alive, should sustain its life. But from this perspective, is the death of the Lord Jesus even possible? No. He had to live and rise again—as the fulfillment of true human life, as a man in whom there were no elements of sin, and thus no beginnings of decay, of dying, of death. Vladimir Solovyov speaks well on this point. According to him, death is the disintegration of the body resulting from the weakness and deadness of the spirit, which can no longer sustain the unity of the organism’s elements. But if we take a strong spirit, one that wholly governs the body, then disintegration becomes impossible. The living force of the spirit, which in fact gives rise to the body itself, will continually renew the tissues of life. Therefore, the death of Jesus Christ is impossible: He could not but rise again. “If physical strength is inevitably conquered by death, if mental strength is insufficient to overcome death, then the boundlessness of moral strength gives to life absolute fullness, excludes all inner division, and therefore does not permit the final sundering of living man into two separate parts: disembodied spirit and decaying matter. The crucified Son of Man had no limits to His spiritual power, and no part of His being could become the prey of death. Being the definitive triumph of life over death, the Resurrection of Christ is not a denial of reason—it is the very triumph of reason in the world. It is not even a miracle, not a supernatural event. The truth of Christ’s Resurrection is a full, total truth—not only a truth of faith, but a truth of reason.” The matter was not the cessation of someone’s life, but whether true life itself—the life of the perfect Righteous One, the one true, authentic, perfect life—would come to an end (V. Solovyov). Such a life could not die, for in it there was none of that “corruptible” appendage which brings about the death of a tree, an animal, or a sinful man. I know, people will still say: “But our mind cannot accept the miracle of the resurrection—it contradicts the laws of thought.” It cannot accept it? That is understandable. In order to accept the truth of faith, one must open the heart to moral union with God. Only the pure in heart, only those who thirst for righteousness, can fully receive revelation—not by reason alone, but with their entire being. But let us ask again: “What laws of thought does the miracle of the resurrection contradict?” None. It contradicts our experience, which affirms that all people die—but is experience the same as a law? Experience testifies about the past, but not the future. Take the testimony of science… There was once no organic matter, only inorganic, lifeless matter—yet from it, organic life arose. From the dead came the living. A great chasm was crossed—one which science cannot span. The emergence of living matter is considered completely incomprehensible and unknowable. Then there was no thought, no human consciousness—and suddenly, it appeared. Again, the birth of consciousness is a miracle, for from material arose the spiritual. We know that thought, like living matter, was born of a unique creative act. Scientists say that life came from non-life, and thought from matter. Let them say so. We agree with them temporarily, only to use their own weapons against them. But the point is that for fifty years they themselves have acknowledged these two great transitions as incomprehensible miracles. So how can their reason then deny a third miracle—the possibility of man triumphing over his present form of existence through the power of his spirit, the possibility of man passing into a new type of existence? In our view, this transition was accomplished in the God-Man Christ, and it cannot be denied as contrary to reason. It is the same as the birth of a living cell from the dead, of spiritual consciousness from matter—a miracle wrought by the Spirit of God. “In any case, from the standpoint of empirical data drawn from the study of the inorganic state of matter, its transition into the organic state and the formation of those nerve-brain nodes and centers which lead to the emergence of consciousness and life—that is, to the temporary triumph of personality over boundless matter—all these natural, real phenomena may seem no less miraculous and mysterious than the final triumph of life over death, of the organic over the inorganic, of the personal over the impersonal, which would take place in a future stage of cosmic development, in a further super-organic state of matter—precisely that which religion calls the resurrection of the flesh. From the standpoint of empirical reason, the fact that man could be born is by no means more understandable or lawful than the possibility that he might rise again. And the transition from pre-being to temporal life is no less ‘supernatural’ than the transition from the temporal life of the body to the eternal life of the Resurrection. The appearance of the Resurrected Flesh is the first point of this new cosmic order, the next step in the world’s evolution—the transition of matter from the organic to the super-organic, from unstable equilibrium to the triumph of the living over the dead, of the personal over the impersonal—to a stable equilibrium.” (Merezhkovsky) source