Our time relates to the Christian era as evening twilight relates to day. Christianity is receding over the horizon; we must judge of it before it hides altogether. We are near enough to feel its warmth and grandeur; we are far enough away to realise that Christianity is not synonymous with religion, but only one possible understanding of life and the divine.

Some like to think that this twilight is the last. ‘Wars and rumours of wars’ are frightening, the belief in the imminent end calms the mind. Even more: the Christian needs the Apocalypse. A story without a fiery end seems meaningless to him. But history is not a ruler’s measurement. It is more like a set of segments inscribed in a circle. The segments are individual cultures; the circle is the universal human abilities in their entirety. Each culture develops human nature in its own direction up to the limit available to it. The totality of such paths forms universal history. All of them are interrupted at some point, but their ends are not events of world history, but of a particular one.

The end of one of the cultural paths is not the end of the world. In the changed circumstances, the basic questions of the mind and soul will remain unchanged, and the main one is: why are these events happening to me and my people? ‘Precise knowledge’ coldly answers: ‘By chance’. This explanation is not nourishing for the mind and unsatisfactory for the soul, and therefore will never be accepted. Consequently, development will continue, albeit on new ground.

However, the transition to the new will not be easy. Culture differs from primitive simplicity by the excess of additional meanings attached to each word (image, action). This excess cannot be acquired at will: it grows naturally, with the course — not of years, but of meanings. You cannot ‘create culture’, because in essence this would mean ‘creating your own past’. One can only choose the past, join a certain tradition. Hence the cultural fruitlessness of revolutions.

It does not follow from the impossibility of ‘creating’ culture that there are no new cultures. They do. But they become ‘new’ only after the passage of time, for a view from the future. For the contemporary observer, there is only a progressive accumulation of values with the addition of what was not there before, and the share of this ‘not there before’ is gradually growing. Culturally, this means the inevitable gradualness of the creation of the new; politically, it means the fruitlessness of any activism, which can only create ideology, but not culture.

Christianity seemed eternal, like any ‘new order’ established by revolution. It seemed both natural and unconditionally suitable for every human being, and moreover universal, suitable for all mankind. Now we see what we have not seen before.

Not only ‘classes and masses’ but also psychological types struggle for predominance in history. The Christian worldview at its core, its poetry and philosophy — also expresses a certain type. The words, ‘Anima naturaliter Christiana est’ may be amended: certain souls. Christianity corresponds to a certain fold of soul, but it cannot be put on, like a dress, on every soul. Like many other things, it is not for all, but for some.

What this fold is — you can guess, looking at the great, subtle-psychological, deeply Christian in its soul-sightedness literature of the 19th century. Christianity is psychological because it is a religion of retreat into the self. The personality boards up windows and doors, and searches the quiet room for signs of the presence of the soul — with the same passion as modernity searches for signs of extraterrestrial life, but with greater success.

Psychologism is the reward of a mind that has abandoned curiosity about the world. By focussing on the narrow band of soul-life associated with feelings of guilt or fear (i. e., the area of childhood experiences primarily), Christianity is made sensitive to clairvoyance.

Rozanov says, ‘From the sweetness of Jesus’ words the world has become bitter’. This is a beautiful description, but not an explanation. The explanation is that the Gospel speaks to the child in man, awakens the child and forces the adult into silence. That is why its quiet speeches are so appealing. It is not by chance that the words ‘diminution’, ‘child’, and ‘these little ones’ are constantly repeated in the Gospel. These are not images, but direct and frank descriptions of psychic practice.

The strongest aspect of the passing era, the basis of the whole edifice, was the belief in a one truth. First this idea entered philosophy, then it made its way into religion. [1] No wonder: our religious conceptions are dictated by our worldview. ‘Philosophy of life’ — a certain understanding of things — precedes religion and defines, if not the requests with which we go to the gods, then the realm of the possible and impossible for our prayers. More importantly: it determines what we receive on those prayers (since ‘According to your faith be it unto you’).

So, in the beginning, there was the certainty of a one, universally binding truth. The belief in the one truth became linked to the idea of the one God. Questions ‘according to Dostoevsky’ became possible: ‘If there is no God, everything is allowed’; ‘If there is no God, how can I be a captain’? It may seem strange, but Dostoevsky is inscribed (or his possibility is inscribed) in monotheism from the beginning. If there is one truth, there are no others at all. His questions are not dictated by atheism, but by the feeling of despair of a man who has realised that the only way to get away from the mainland of the One Truth is to go nowhere, into the void.

A true ‘unity’ of thought, faith and feeling would be disastrous (as the experience of the 20th century has shown). In reality, the unity of the Christian world was far from perfect. The beginnings of local, national understandings of the divine broke out here and there under the name of ‘heresies’. Whole nations or families of nations were drifting away from the universal faith to a ‘home’ religion. It was not weakness that was to blame for the schisms, but the demands of life.

A nation wishing for its own development, its own losses, but also its own gains, can and must understand the divine in its own way. Everything great in culture is national, and is created in the measure of the peculiarity of this understanding. It is impossible to develop all the faculties of human nature at the same time. What sides will be developed in this nation, this culture, is determined by their religion. The law of inverse connection is at work here: people receive according to their prayers, and ask for what, according to their belief, the deity favours.

It is said of Dostoevsky: nationalist and narrowly Orthodox. ‘Why ‘Russians’ and not humanity; why ‘Orthodoxy’ and not Christianity?’ — Leo Shestov asks him. This is the wrong point of reference. When Dostoevsky says that ‘God is the conciliar soul of the people’, he is deeply religious, only this religiosity is not Christian, but an older one — ‘pagan’. Here it is necessary to clarify the meaning of the word. Paganism in the Christian world is called something ‘backward’, ‘home-grown’, ‘low’ in comparison with the ideal of the universal Church.

However, the dividing line is not here. Qualitative evaluations (depending on one’s proximity to the only-approved truth) are inappropriate in culture. Paganism is opposed to Christianity not in the realm of morality, but in space: as a local, national, special understanding of truth. Christianity, on the other hand, offers one truth for all. Unity without coercion is not achieved. When Nikolai Danilevsky says that Western civilisation is inherently violent, he does not complete the sentence: violence is presupposed by the very idea of a singular and exclusive truth.

The consequences of the application of this one truth were at first magnificent, then terrible. Christianity entered a world full of hidden meaning, and leaves it meaningless, because it has invested all its capital in the idea of one God, one truth, which must be preached to the ends of the earth, and the rejection of which means the rejection of all reason in the universe.

The same can be said in a more down-to-earth way. European-Christian civilisation has spread its understanding of life over the whole earth. This understanding has grown old and is decaying. Europe no longer has the spiritual power or the material strength to defend it — but the world needs to go on living, albeit without Europe and its truths.

So, the original feature of Christianity, the source of its basic strength: the belief that there is no more than one truth about one subject. The principle is powerful, all-destroying. The ‘final truth’ is jealous, intolerant. When it leaves, it leaves behind a blank slate. Nihilism is a natural stage in its development. Hence the barrenness of the present world.

Where Christianity departs from, the ‘abomination of desolation’ is established. Nothing strong, self-sufficient, capable of independent existence comes to take its place; all post-Christian forces live solely by the negation of one or another part of the Christian inheritance.

In the life of mind and feeling today the reaction against Christianity prevails. Either pure nihilism, death-worship: ‘there is nothing but matter visible to the eye and power observable by instruments, and everything is meaningless’; or counter-values hastily reworked from Christian prohibitions (e. g., the rejection of the Christian abhorrence of the flesh — understood as the seduction of the masses wholesale and retail).

Nihilism is opposed by the illegitimate children of the departing faith: ideology and ‘only-faithful worldviews’ of various varieties. They manifest a desire for belonging to a one truth, to a group of ‘rightly believing’ people. The totality of the Christian worldview is inherited by ‘accurate knowledge’, here again ‘one flock and one shepherd’. The atheistic-religious, irreconcilable, overbearing ‘scientific worldview’ is, in essence, the last Christian heresy.

The more ‘precise’ this knowledge is (closer to the world’s foundations), the more unprovable it is; the more unprovable it is, the more demanding it is. It is characterised by dogmatism, the thirst for power over the spirit, the belief in one and only one truth (with rare brilliant exceptions), which we know well from the past epoch.

The forms of thought are generally more durable than its content. Militant godlessness (and under the mask of ‘accurate knowledge’ hides exactly it) has preserved all forms of Christian thinking, turning the content inside out.

This is the natural course of things. Rejecting the past, reaction does not build its own ladder of values; it only changes the signs of existing values. The forms of any reaction are predetermined by the forms of the phenomenon it denies. It is not given the ability to form itself. We must not forget this when we look at the anti-Christian movement of our days. The successor epoch is ugly to the extent of the one-sidedness of the predecessor epoch.

The post-Christian world is not merely ‘distorted’. It bends and shrugs its shoulders, wanting to correct the previous distortions, but it lacks the necessary fullness of development, the maturity to give itself a new shape. Russia, freed from Bolshevism, suffers from the same inability to create forms, despite all the differences in the phenomena.

Revolution, a break with the old world, always creates a void in the place of previous meanings. The desire to fill this empty space creates ‘ideology’. To give man a sense of belonging to something greater than himself; to give him a sense of righteousness (the need of Christian peoples, unquenchable after the departure of Christianity); to give him a meaning of actions higher than mere expediency…

It can be considered as a rule: having lost Christianity, peoples are taken for building a utopia, i. e. a society forcibly ordering thoughts and opinions, bound by one idea, a kind of (pardon the barbaric word) ideocracy. The Russians and Germans were the first to follow this path; the Anglo-Saxons in their time, due to the peculiarities of development, did not notice the end of Christianity and stepped on the path of building an ideologically conditioned utopia only now. Ideology, the ‘one true doctrine’, those who disagree with it are forced to silence, is the main sign of such a society. ‘My worth is determined by how many people I have silenced’ is what the builders of the next Beautiful New World (socialist, national-socialist, liberal) would think, if they were in the habit of thinking.

Another surviving form of thought is belief in the imminent ‘end of the world’, whether for human sin or for no reason at all (here modern thought is twofold; one ‘school’ maintains that we will be punished by planet Earth for the suffering we have caused it; the other likes to believe in a rock from heaven, or a deadly disease, or an extermination war). I say ‘faith’ because the belief in a swift and certain end is completely irrational, not derived from any data of science. It is a matter of judgement, not knowledge of facts.

Here we return to where we started this conversation. Belief in the end of the world, especially in the imminent end, paradoxically calms a man, gives meaning to history and his own life, and at the same time frees him from anxiety, because the worst is about to happen. The one who is going to live has much more anxiety….

Thus modern man (no matter how much he claims otherwise) cannot free himself from the values of the previous epoch. He either denies Christianity, putting an opposite value in place of every previous one, or he clings to the basic forms, ideas, abandoning their core: faith in the divine and eternal life.  The following ideas proved more viable than Christianity, and still flicker in the mental darkness: personal righteousness (communion with the highest truth in deed and thought); the end of the world, understood not as extinction, but as the violent end of history, the last judgement; the only-faithful doctrine, requiring the eradication of heresies. And the foundation of fundamentals: belief in the only possible truth about one subject.

A person who does not believe in a swift and inevitable end to the world order is in a favourable position, but only partly. The realisation that the curtain will not fall definitively does not exempt one from fears about the immediate future. One can only speculate (and sometimes try to predict) what paths thought will take when it leaves its usual course. It is unlikely that it will remain in shallow waters. One thing is certain: there will be no restoration of the old. We can put the old stones in the foundation of a new culture, but what is destroyed cannot be rebuilt. This recognition unleashes our hands and frees us from unnecessary dreams.

[1] ‘As for monotheism in the strict sense of the word, it is a philosophical concept developed by Greek philosophers of the classical era. Its assimilation by traditional religion took place through the comprehension of the younger deities of the pantheon as a special category of beings — ‘angels’, whose nature is not divine (previously, the younger deities were called ‘angels’ only by virtue of their duties as messengers or messengers of the elder god). Christianity experienced such conceptualisation at an early stage, due to its spread in the Greek environment. It began to penetrate Judaism only from the 8th century A. D. through the Aramaic-Arabic Christian-Islamic mediation. For this reason, contrary to popular belief, Judaism became monotheistic not first, but last of the ‘world religions’. — Sergei Petrov. Behold thy g-ds, Israel. The pagan religion of the Jews.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Twilight Time.

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