FAITH AND IDENTITY #

By Kiril Mikhailov

To my friend M.M. Rodin

The field lies open—nothing is sacred! A qualitatively new godlessness has arrived. We have entered a time in which faith is wholly overtaken by pretense, by a mere likeness of faith. The believer has been replaced by an actor playing the believer. In my view, no period of religious apathy can compare with our present age in its sheer quality of godlessness. Outward signs of religiosity, the self-identification of being a believer, religious identity itself, have displaced a deeper, true spirituality—a mystical union with God, and the search for that union. The external trappings of religiosity now proclaim themselves to be ends in themselves, possessing intrinsic worth.

The spirit of this age has substituted the attributes of faith for faith itself, and has replaced believers with imitators of belief. And these imitators talk, debate, argue, and try to prove things. They construct entire worlds beneath the emblems of a faith to which they are only formally connected. And one cannot expose them—because this imitation of faith has penetrated the very layers of the psyche. Faith has never faced a trial like this. Faith as a manifestation may remain; but faith as a search is vanishing; faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) is becoming, in essence, unattainable. The very capacity for faith is disappearing on a massive scale.

As an Orthodox Old Believer, I am little troubled by other confessions—except to the extent that they have become deadly snares for my friends. I shall speak of Faith and Religion, meaning Orthodoxy. But given the flat universality of modern spirituality, I believe that my observations may well apply to other confessions as well.

Religion and Faith #

Religion is the sum of relationships brought about by Faith. Religion is broader and more expansive than faith. Faith is a singular act; religion is the manifestation, the concretization of that act. Faith comes into being within religion. If faith is the water of a river, then religion is its riverbed. Without a riverbed, the river vanishes, turning into a pond or a swamp. Religion is a cloud of relationships—toward those near and far alike; it is the very system of “neighbor–stranger,” “friend–enemy,” a scale of values, a code of “good–evil.” If faith is a leap toward the great and supernatural Goal—the salvation of the soul—then religion is the realization of the Way in practical terms. The term “religion” came relatively late to Orthodoxy, and later still to Rus’. Other concepts were adapted by the Orthodox Church from pagan Slavic culture—vera (faith) and pravda (truth, righteousness). These concepts were brilliantly formulated by I.S. Peresvetov: vera is the leap toward God; pravda is the daily service to Him.¹

Religion transforms the entire scale of values, one’s self-definition, and self-evaluation. Faith is often described in the broadest of terms—as an irrational, non-sensory conviction in something. But conviction is only the beginning of the transformation of a person into another kind of being, only the beginning of divinization. As it acquires practically existential forms, Faith fulfills itself. “Faith without works is dead” (James 2:26). Thus, although the Way toward God begins with Faith, it by no means ends there. One must still consider: which is more essential for the transformation of a person—faith or religion?

Dogmatic formulation, the whole ritual-liturgical system, the full range of everyday prescriptions and moral norms of religion—all this serves to give form to the amorphous soul that has leapt toward God.² If the soul is not given form, it will lose itself in the cosmic vastness or simply be unable to go beyond its own limits.³ Religion is born from faith; it is faith’s clothing and outline. This clothing warms and protects Faith, revealing to the outside observer the body of Faith, the motion of its limbs.

And now, it seems that someone else has taken refuge inside religion—someone without a core, who cunningly dons its garb and imitates the movements and gestures of a believing person. And it is hard to discern that the one clothed in religious forms lacks the very thing from which religion begins—FAITH. An unbroken, unchanged soul has been squeezed into shells it does not deserve (like withering ladies in youthful clothing). And this final distortion lays claim to spiritual authority, to the guidance of the lost, to the denunciation of evil, and so on. These imitators pretend to be believers, using the entire secondary formalistic arsenal and placing it at the very center—where Faith should be.⁴ And the fundamental absence of Faith surprises or frightens no one. This rootless godlessness is masterfully decorated. The animal rumbling of untamed flesh is dressed up with beards, long skirts, psalms, and pious books. In religion, burrows have been dug by those who should never have been allowed in. And now—try smoking them out! What, then, has caused such a deep, psychological imitation?

Faith Is the Way #

S.L. Frank, in disputing the materialist-scientists of his time, asserted that in the realm of truth, faith is no weaker than knowledge. Faith is even more objective, because in faith a person touches and is fused with the object of belief, whereas science always observes from a distance and is greatly limited by that separation. Knowledge is conjectural; Faith is a bond with the Transcendent. The believing person easily and freely touches God and His manifestations in nature. Divine grace becomes as real as one’s own skin, lips, name. Mystical contact is the foundation of true Faith. In that moment, all of being suddenly bursts forth with unearthly radiance, and this blaze scorches the person, leaving burn marks on the mind, the emotions, the conduct, the values. Such faith radically transforms a person. This is what the Savior and His disciples called for throughout the entire history of the Church.

When faith has burned through the core of the mind, no facts or artifacts can dim or conceal it. Faith simply consumes life. On the charred field of what remains—those bits of life left by God that have been tempered in flame—there grows a new life, fresh, true: Life-by-Faith. Everything that once filled the human shell has been shaken out, and the person, like a sack, is filled anew—with the things from Above.

Perhaps Faith need not be a Revolution, but an Evolution, slowly transforming a person over years or decades. Perhaps the old inner man burns like peat, slowly. But eventually, a qualitative rebirth comes, and the person becomes Other. Perhaps. But to me, it seems that Faith is a Revolution. With such a “maximalist” view of the phenomenon of faith, one understands that if anything decrepit and alien to faith remains alive within a person, he is not a believer.⁵ He has not been fully reborn (has not died to the world).

The point is, faith does not exist as an object. And as a process, it is elusive and scarcely observable. Faith is the touch of the Lord. The meaning is not in the word, nor in the process, but in God Himself. According to the Christian view, faith is given by God—that is, He Himself enables a certain person to make that leap into Heaven. From the human side, little and much is required.⁶ Above all, one must be resolved to burn oneself up, to cast off the old self and rush toward Heaven. What matters here is the intention to renounce what holds one to the earth, to the old world. And what holds us? Only one thing—our own rotten “I.”

Faith is the fervent desire to place God in the place where “I” once stood—without detours, without regrets for oneself or for the crushed remnants of personality. Abraham laid Isaac upon the altar without trickery, without bargains, without compromise. And only when this sacrifice of self has been made—only when the stone has been cast through Christ’s window—must one sit in that cold emptiness and wait. Wait to see if the door will open and whether He will come forth, bearing your new name on a white stone. After a person has renounced himself, a certain time passes, certain sufferings, certain pains. That emptiness is terrifying, for it can only be filled by steadfast expectation of an answer to one’s sacrifice. And this will only happen if the sacrifice was total—leaving nothing for oneself! Then the Lord comes to such a person and makes His dwelling with him. God suddenly fills the emptied person with new life, gives him a Goal and a Meaning. Everything begins again—from zero, from emptiness.

Christ begins where the “I” dies!

Faith is only the Way, at the end of which lies the Other. And if a person acknowledges His existence, that is only the beginning. The middle—is emptiness.⁷ The end—is God.

The Spirit of Faith and the Breath of Identity #

In modern religiosity—as the capacity for self-renunciation for His sake—something particularly vile is revealed. In my view, modern man has lost (or perhaps rejected?) this very capacity for self-renunciation. He seems to be going somewhere, but at the end of the Way there is no God—only his own cherished, cosmic “self.” A self merely given a cosmetic renovation, with the same rats still scurrying behind the walls.

Since God is not at the end of this path, then this path does not lead to God. Therefore, it is not faith, but merely a kind of self-discovery—or a game (hide and seek, or tag). A game with meanings: the catwalk of modern religiosity. If faith does not lead a person to complete inner transformation, then that person never truly sought it—never truly desired to annihilate his self for God’s sake. It is not a death of the self, but a simulation of death. To lie for a while in a coffin and pretend to be dead, just to avoid certain problems.⁸ Or to experience something new. To feel ONESELF in a new way. IDENTITY! To feel oneself not just as a human being, but as a Christian. What does it feel like? New flavors, a journey into the unknown, different landscapes, different palettes. Originality! A new brand for an old product.

And also—what Toffler describes so well—a sense of order and clarity amid the general disintegration of meaning,⁹ when one loses one’s face in a world that doesn’t need it, or when one senses one’s own facelessness. Thus arose new types of religious movements—not based on mystical revelation or even strained notions of catholicity, but on the structure of the gathering itself, on the precision and bluntness of doctrine, on moral intransigence, on high demands made of members, on a particularly theatrical stance toward “the world.” In such sects, one feels “in place.” And this clarity, this mirroring of oneself in “one’s own,” gives one strength! The subcultural illusion of brotherhood can achieve much.

This is the core of modern faith: “a variety of individual armor for egocentrism.”¹⁰ And here we find Consumerism! The “I” goes nowhere; it simply changes colors, swaps shells, adopts a new vocabulary, fresh gestures, flamboyant postures before the past. But the core remains the same! Nothing Other! No one vanishes from this global Show—the roles merely shift. The producers and sponsors remain the same.

“Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof” (2 Timothy 3:5). The usual interpretation of this verse—as a reproach against mere hypocrisy or hidden sins—is now too narrow. Today, the phrase shines with new colors; today it reveals an entire sweeping community that outwardly lives for God (often even in their own eyes), yet is deprived of that Power which leads to the Father. What we now face is a deeper, psychic form of hypocrisy—a hypocrisy before oneself.

The causes behind the mass spread of pseudo-faith are hidden from me, though their operation and logic are sufficiently described in Holy Scripture and the patristic tradition. The very physiology of the soul has changed—it has become hollow. Our minds can no longer calculate without calculators or remember a single page we’ve read, and our souls can no longer discern spirits, intuit evil and deception within ourselves, distinguish beginnings from endings, rest from stagnation. A universal spiritual castration has taken place.

The Pseudo-Believer #

A new type of pseudo-believer has emerged. This person often sincerely believes he is seeking God, believes he has already touched Him, imagines that he converses with Him in the depths of his heart, that he is guided through life by His hand. The pseudo-believer considers himself changed, transformed, different. But he does not see his deep inner immutability, his core selfhood—his godlessness.

The society of spectacle has penetrated religion and taught it how to lie exquisitely to itself, to stage performances not only before others, but also before one’s own self. The most improbable imitations appear, the most fantastical screens that conceal the same worldly monstrosity, the same abomination of desolation. In the era of virtuality, one cannot tell a curtain from a panorama.

External reflection still matters, as it did before, but in the age of rootlessness, the most valued thing is the inner sensation of belonging to a religion. The pseudo-believer may never miss a service, may fast and pray fervently. He may even take up arms against non-believers. Yet all of this is nothing more than moving scenery. These phenomena are aptly, if subjectively and one-sidedly, described by Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer.¹¹

The reason for such deep contemporary masking of the unbeliever as a believer lies in the full entrenchment of selfhood. Put simply, man no longer sees, senses, or knows any being beyond his own. At times, when the masks suddenly fall, the realization of his worthlessness is terrifying—but more often, the screens hold firm. The world-as-stage has a vested interest in keeping them in place. Even when the consciousness of one’s nothingness is briefly exposed, it paradoxically strengthens the pseudo-believer in his self-hypocrisy. Indeed, religion is often sought out by those lost in the world. But the pseudo-believer does not find in religion the revelation—the negation—of the self (for he never truly seeks it). Loneliness remains. The modern world-show has begun working actively to ensure that pseudo-believers feel comfortable in their adopted religious shells. That is the modern condition. The entire modern age in the West (and in its satellites) has been dedicated to forming a secular, godless, self-sufficient type of human being. A world was built that stirred no appetite for the Transcendent. Yet still, there were always the Thirsting and the Hungry for Truth. They were the ones who cast doubt on all the Babel towers of state and society.

Now a new tool has been invented—what some call the galvanization of religion. Instead of fighting religiosity as an alternative, instead of outlawing it (as Lenin did) or relegating it to the realm of pathology (as Freud did), religiosity is now assimilated into the existing order.¹² The believing person is integrated into the prevailing system of images and values, granted the freedom to express himself—within permitted limits. A freedom, it seems, that no one even really wants. Thus, the existence of a “secular believer” has become possible. Cell phones, the internet, cable television, freedom of the press and assembly—all these quietly draw even the sincerely faithful into the realm of the demon of modernity.

This has made it possible for one to enter religion whose deepest aim is not rebirth, but disguise—not death to the world, but rebranding, reimaging. Such processes have always existed, but today imitation of religion has become the norm. “Strangers” in the faith have always existed, but the Church had many ways of identifying and expelling them. Today, the old methods no longer work—because religiosity itself has become flat and superficial. What’s more, all modern “cleansing campaigns,” in their vulgarity and crudeness, only serve to unite pseudo-believers further and magnetize them to the object of their so-called faith.¹³

The pseudo-believer continues to exist within religion in his own space of emotions, passions, and thoughts. His worldview cocoon is impermeable to faith but easily colored from the outside. Perhaps this space of solitude is the true goal of the pseudo-believer. Fromm is partly wrong: loneliness gives more sweetness than bitterness. One can hide from fear, one can suppress bitterness—but the cloying sweetness of solitary self-existence cannot be resisted. That overly sweet tone—that is the voice in which modern man speaks with himself, in the warm syrup of his own insides.

“The most fervent fanatics are often egoists who have lost faith in themselves due to innate deficiencies or external circumstances. Their egotism itself is a fine instrument: they cease using it for their failed ‘self’ and devote it to some ‘sacred cause.’ And even if the faith they acquire is a faith of love and humility, they themselves can be neither loving nor humble.”¹⁴

Hoffer spoke of the “squandering of life” as a cause for turning to faith. In his view, faith is merely an attempt to dissolve oneself in a mass of identical others, to hide from one’s loathed and failed “self.” Modern man, realizing that his life is a lie or illusion, is no longer capable of rushing toward the True Life. No—he will wander the fields of modern informational abundance in search of more comfortable sensations. A place where pain is not felt, where there are no disturbances or tremors of being. (And if tremors occur, they are permitted only as controlled doses of worldview adrenaline to spice up the boredom.) Modern man is not going to God—he is merely choosing a god. Or a religion. Here, as D.E. Weiss aptly notes, the driving principle is no longer a passionate thirst for the Beyond, for the Heavenly, but the simple system of “like/don’t like.”¹⁵ Modern man, even when intuiting God beyond the world, searches for a path to Him that will please the traveler.

Religion is chosen like a garment at a market stall. And when a person chooses faith,¹⁶ when he initiates his value system, the decisive factor is not self-denial, but personal experience. There is no longer faith, nor pain, nor will. There is only a kit—roughly the same for everyone—of books read, movies watched, rock songs heard, touching encounters, scars of experience, and fleeting sweetnesses of inspiration. In striving toward God, man ends up placing himself in God’s place—just repainted. Nothing has changed. The inner self is preserved in brine.

One cannot lie to God. It is simply impossible. If a man lies, he lies only to himself; he makes confessional faces in the mirror, hoping to be satisfied by the reflection. In the temple of the modern human heart, there are no icons—only mirrors. And where is God? If God were to appear before man, nothing would remain of that man. Everything would burn. God fills the true inner self. And that terrifies the modern pseudo-believer. The inner self is everything! No one wants to be devalued.

Can modern man break free from his selfhood—or does he simply not want to? Debord argued that he cannot: the System produces its own “poles of negation.”¹⁷ That is, the rejection of the world’s primitivism and soullessness is itself staged. Refusing to watch talk shows has itself become a kind of talk show—because all of life has become a talk show. Hoffer believed that faith is a game of hide-and-seek from the self.¹⁸ Compulsion or inability? Inability or role-playing? I believe there is a subtle and very modern nuance here, one that reconciles various answers. The System has raised a kind of person who cannot desire anything Heavenly—and under his so-called spirituality, specific faith-deflectors have been installed. That is, all the escape routes from reality are already calculated, and the “runners” themselves are programmed to act in predetermined ways. Every pitiful attempt to find God is funneled into pre-approved channels. Mutual insurance. So if suddenly (in an ideal world!) we were to break all the chains of the modern information realm and rush into the Freedom, to God—we would immediately suffocate. Because we have been re-educated and weaned off the oxygen of faith in favor of the carbon dioxide of ritual.

Pop and Pop-Culture Religion #

It’s nauseating. The problem is, humanity has not been canceled. Fromm once feared that man would become a robot, an obedient executor of his programmed functions.¹⁹ Baudrillard wrote that the terrorist is just as much a product of mass media as any television consumer, and that there is nothing otherworldly or alternative in him—no freshness.²⁰ It’s entirely possible we’ve all become zombies. But I still believe that man continues to make choices. And in any case, God probably won’t allow us to be fully turned into robots. At most—cyborgs. Yet the very need to make a choice is so unpleasant to modern man that he has reduced it to a primitive farce.²¹ Fukuyama vividly shows how we only choose from what is already offered, and how feeble our selectivity actually is.²² Who made it this way? We did, ourselves! But hasn’t it always been like that? If our ability to choose the Heavenly, the Divine, has been annulled (like Zamyatin’s operation to remove the imagination), then everything is clear—though still sad. But what if we’ve simply forgotten how to look There, toward the Quiet Light? What if the emancipation of the “I” has gone so far that man has become a different biological species, incapable of rushing toward God by despising himself?

I—that is Hell. Poison! Satan fills the soul that does not seek the Father of Lights—not by turning it into a servant of Satan, but by making man serve himself. For any path that does not lead to God, leads to hell. Even the path to oneself, even one’s “personal choice,” even one’s “self-expression.”

The “I” must dissolve for Christ’s sake. Not hide, not melt into a crowd of similar solitudes. “He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39). The Lord comes only into a heart and a personality that has been shattered.

That’s why when people try to “escape” from the shallowness of pop-culture reality by diving into religion, political parties, sects, or role-playing games—they don’t go anywhere. They remain right here, in the same coordinates. (Look harder!) They’ve simply moved into another folder on the same computer. At most, they’ve changed file extensions (“.doc” to “.rtf”). No essential transformation takes place—we are incapable of it.²³

At the root of the modern “personal choice” lies not the renunciation of Selfhood, but the renaming of oneself. It’s all just different shells! Flashy Muslims proud of their growing strength; deliberately unwashed punks with matted hair; Old Believers wearing long beards and bearing a cosmic pride. The difference? Only in the languages and fonts used on their price tags. Each person knows exactly what part of his own he paid for his identity, what he has left in the wallet of worldview, and what he gained. What from the old self aligns with the new interior—and what had to be discarded to avoid internal conflict of identity. There is only the “I”! Nothing is holy anymore because there is no space left where man does not dwell. One pretends to be a martyr, a prophet, an apostle—believing that the pretense itself will delay or mask the sweetly pulsing “I.”

We’ve entered a time when it’s not just faith that’s gone—but the very capacity for faith. There remains only a multitude of performances and self-costumes, into which the actors pour their passion—because in this world of boundless, reckless plurality, they are searching for THEIR face, their identity.

Identity has displaced religiosity. #

The problem with today’s religious situation in Russia—and, I think, in the whole world—is that the lost, the stupefied, the dissolved individuals floating in an emptied space have found an opportunity to rush into religion and hide behind God from their own wretchedness. Those now crawling into churches are not seeking salvation from the world, but salvation from pop culture.

Similarities and Differences Between Identity and Faith #

Similarities

Identity and Faith can both clearly express their creed, define their boundaries, their content, and the limits of what is permitted—and they can do so using the very same words.

Both Faith and Identity are absolutely uncompromising. Compromise, all forms of ecumenism, are the domain either of lukewarm believers or of unpassionate imitators who secretly recognize themselves as such. Faith and Identity both zealously guard their core.

There is an extraordinary power in formal prohibitions. The more complexes and taboos there are, the stronger both the believer and the pseudo-believer become in the world.

Differences

Although both the believer and the imitator rigidly define their confessional framework, the purpose of that framework is different. For the believer, the confession of faith is the beginning of the Way. For the imitator, confession is an end in itself—a treasure. When a threat arises to that confession, the believer remains calm or steps aside, for he knows clearly: he is moved by God, and “God is not mocked.” The Lord will protect His own or grant the believer insight on how to defend himself—again, through the grace of God.

The pseudo-believer, on the other hand, has found himself on his own. His outer shell is often all he has. He does not feel Something—or Someone—behind him. Inside and out, there is only loneliness. He has nowhere to retreat, and so he hates any challenge to his identity.

“Since their convictions are a function of will, they cling to them stubbornly. And since those convictions are generally rooted in character traits and personal choice, any criticism is perceived as a personal insult.”²⁴

When the believer is uncompromising, it is out of fear of offending God. His is a strictness toward sin, which separates man from God and from the world. The imitator’s aggression, by contrast, is the most ferocious. At the center of the imitator’s so-called faith stands only the I—and nothing more. He has nowhere (and no reason!) to take a leap of faith. Thus, any threat to his identity provokes an intensely aggressive backlash, up to the complete destruction of the threat.

The self-imitator has no retreat. For him, cinema, philosophy, and secular culture are absolute evils—not because they pull him away from God, but because they scatter his self-definition in a world of alien thoughts and foreign images. His rigidity and meticulousness in ritual and discipline are directly proportional to how afraid he is of being lost in a culture not his own.

But the true believer fears nothing. If he senses that the external world does not touch him—does not penetrate him or place a wall between him and God—he is at peace. The main weapon of the believer is simply to turn away in disgust.²⁵

The principal difference, however, is this: Faith is a Way that continues beyond the self. Identity, by contrast, moves toward the self. Faith is the knowledge of God—a departure from the self; identity is the knowledge of the self through a religious value system. The key point is that, outwardly, these two paths are almost indistinguishable. One may intuitively sense the difference between the imitator and the believer (though not always!), but putting it into words is very difficult.

“We believe in what we like. We believe in what we want to believe in.”²⁶

Some romantics of Orthodoxy in the early 20th century unoriginally dreamed of an approaching era of the Holy Spirit following the age of the Son—the Logos. Such a construction is neither new nor Orthodox; it predates even the chiliastic heresy. It stems (in part) from the words of the prophet Jeremiah about a New World in which every man shall be taught by the Lord. And now we have reached the stage of complete profanation of the sacred.²⁷ The Heavenly Jerusalem has been dragged down beneath the feet of featherless, two-legged beasts. A full-blown imitation of Heaven has taken hold. The thousand-year war of flesh and spirit has ended, as always, in a dreadful bifurcated synthesis. We have entered the era of the triumph of the animal spirit, of embodied spirituality. Religiosity has become flat; it no longer penetrates the human or social fabric. This is Girenko’s “design of surfaces.” We have forgotten how to believe, because we have forgotten how to renounce ourselves—or rather, we have learned how not to renounce ourselves and still feel satisfaction and self-sufficiency. The informational mold of the Church, decorated with images of crosses, domes, and the “Russian Idea,” now lays claim to self-sufficiency.

There have always been imitators. But now they have taken root and declared themselves established. Just like Čapek’s salamanders: once mere animals, and in time, they became a force, blowing up continents and dictating to the indigenous humans how and where to live. And everyone seems to understand the tragic-idiocy of the situation, in which beasts mimic humans—but it is impossible to utter the essential truth: they have no soul. So it is with pseudo-believers: strange creatures have crept into churches, donned vestments, cassocks, and mantles, grown out their beards, and drone along in unison with the Ancients.

And so, the role of religion in modernity has changed. (Even the very notion of “role” is telling!) Religion has become an outlet for boredom—a ghetto for the incomplete, the weary, the bitter, and the overfed.²⁸ And the System itself places them there—first, to maintain its own stability; second, to use the ritualism of the pseudo-believers to crush and discredit the remaining Faithful.

Overall, no one today seems capable of genuine spiritual transformation. So what can be done? With us—nothing. But we must not make the mistake of confusing ourselves with the world. We are beyond repair—but the world might still be saved (if Christ delays His return). People still dream of the Huns, of barbarians who will burn everything down and dance before the purifying bonfire of our books and computers, founding a new world. A good world! But it is becoming ever clearer that no barbarism will save us—that even the secretly desired threats of Islam or China are nothing more than modified versions of the same global order. We have become rooted in the earth; we have subdued it. We, the demons, have become kings unto ourselves and have lost the possibility of immortality. Nothing more can be done with us—we are manure.

But we can become fertilizer in the soil, from which something great and luminous might yet grow. If our total spiritual impotence is at least tinged with a thirst for true spiritual renewal, then we may still raise our children to be Real—teach them not to follow themselves, but to follow God. We must tear ourselves apart! All our culture that binds us to the worldly must be destroyed, swept away, purged. A great war of each person against the self! We must devalue ourselves, pour everything within us toward the One who gave us everything.

God is obscured behind the smoke we ourselves have released—but He is there! Each of us must burn himself. The Old Believers burned the body to cleanse the soul. We must burn our reason, our feelings, our emotions, our values (which are nothing more than books and images tattooed into our souls!) to find Him—to make space for Him.

The problem is that these methods have long been co-opted by sects, parties, fight clubs, and the like. And nothing happens. For those who want self-annihilation, the System has already reserved compartments. Educated intellectuals, Chechen war veterans, healthy young women—now all dance at charismatic frenzies, hand over their apartments to Jehovah’s Witnesses, give their money to “Anastasia.” What can we do? How can we cleanse ourselves for real? God knows! The one who goes into a sect (or similar) is not seeking God’s but his own. Not a new spirit, but a disguise for the stench of the old—masked with modern perfumes. For the full complex of passions remains. Sectarians may not smoke or drink, but the key thing remains—they have found themselves.

K.N. Leontiev believed that, in principle, it is possible to make the journey from ritual to God, from reverence to faith (he himself had made such a journey). He called it a “habit”: the gradual observance of everyday and prayerful prescriptions, continual participation in services, which “softens” the soul’s sinfulness and makes it more receptive to the Light.²⁹ Is such a thing possible? Perhaps—only when the depth of the heart has not been corrupted by the sin of selfhood, when there remains within a faint remembrance of Him. But what about us? The industrial communist desert has been replaced by a post-industrial Westernized frenzy. Could anything have survived three hundred years of Romanov politicking and the commercialization of the Church, seventy years of Soviet-forced desacralization, twenty years of dressing up in used funeral shrouds, and the age of computer games? Who managed to keep their kindling dry?

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, many dreamed of some new barbarians who would break the fields of imperial soullessness and plow up the soil for the ancient Holiness of Rus to grow anew.

“Fall on us, drunken horde,
Come thundering down from shadowed camps—
To stir this withered body
With waves of burning blood.”
—Valery Bryusov

“I want… for it to strike—a real blow, strong enough to make us shriek, to clutch our heads, just once. Otherwise, this small-minded dog’s life of ours will poison all life.”
—Aleksey Remizov³⁰

The upheaval came, the “stirring and shaking,” the Huns arrived with Mausers, they slashed away the overripe, plowed up the virgin soil—and it all turned out to be yet another dreadful scheme. A profanation. In the end, what was destroyed was that sacred, untouchable, faintly holy thing that lingered among “the lowly”—that last capacity for Faith. The very thing that had enchanted the Slavophile romantics and the Eurasian pragmatists alike. The banners of the people were indeed raised—but, in full accord with Christian eschatology, the names emblazoned upon them were not the ones hoped for…

And now—who can raise the standard of national spiritual rebirth, when there is no longer a nation, nor a homeland, nor even the capacity or desire to comprehend the Higher? When the only unifier, the only leader and god—is the Television?

The only thing each of us can still do is to destroy the rot of the world that festers deep within ourselves. It is impossible—but the striving for it must remain.

And amid this grand inner reworking, we may still raise our children to be Human. To teach our sons to be men: responsible, spiritually engaged, compassionate, kind, and active—men for whom the family is not an accident, nor a coincidence, nor a tool for self-assertion, but a natural spiritual need. To raise our daughters to be women: industrious, loving toward husbands and children, capable householders, laughing cynically at Western (= modern) feminism.

We may no longer be able to enter the Promised Heavens ourselves—but, having suffered enough, we can still cut a path for our descendants. That will be the work that cleanses us, and gives a faint hope for an honest and true encounter with the Lord—if it be His will and His mercy.

Rise up, ropes, from the mud,
Taut and furious in a single chord!
Shall we not bury the body
Of this overripe scum?
May the Most High help you
To shake all that is arrogant.
You, who will destroy me—
I bow to you, with courtesy.

Great Lent – 2007
Balakovo

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