What does a man see when he looks into his own soul? First of all, the experiences of conscience, not even thoughts, but feelings of good and evil. Some idea of morality is inherent in us from the very beginning. The soul asks questions of good and evil quite independently of the influences of the outside world. Nowadays it is not common and dangerous to talk about morality.

However, no matter how much we try to get rid of morality, no matter how much we want to drown it, it still surfaces at the end, as a consequence of our actions. Morality is seen as some kind of personal affront, but its meaning is not at all ‘this is what I think of you’, but ‘this is what your actions will lead to’. Morality is the teaching of the consequences of our actions. That’s why moralists get stoned. Then, of course, people cry, but they keep their self-respect and do not defile their souls with remorse. ‘I cannot’, says the modern man, ‘allow myself to be ashamed, because shame would make me less strong, and moreover dependent on those who taught me to be ashamed. And in order not to doubt himself, such a person drives away conscience and those who speak of it. And faith in God disappears at the same time as the ability to doubt oneself… and two words are written on the banner of humanity: power and pride.

What is morality? A fusion of ideas about the desirable and the forbidden, in other words, about the healthy and the sick. Morality divides human desires into those worthy and those not worthy of satisfaction; without recognising the unworthiness of certain desires, it does not exist. At a certain stage of development, the consistently pursued ‘liberalism’ (for lack of a better word, we will call it commitment to freedom for its own sake) excludes the very possibility of the existence of morality, and in the modern West this stage has already been reached. All desires are recognised as equally ‘natural’ and worthy, and the main task is to protect the human person from restrictions on his right to desire and achieve what he desires. Freedom turns out to be a value without quality, an airless medium in which desires glide without resistance… Unrestrained and insatiable form-making is encouraged, with complete disregard for content, whereas morality, with its prohibitions and inducements, contributed primarily to the development of a rich and complex content (not to go into long explanations — already because it suppressed all simple and lowly impulses). The abolition of morality led to the collapse of the content and the careful guarding of the empty form. In the words ‘free personality’ the emphasis is on ‘freedom’, but there may be no ‘personality’ at all. The view of society as a legally protected variety of increasingly diverse forms is reminiscent of a researcher’s delight at some ‘delightful mould’, and perhaps has the same root: it is the same Darwin’s doctrine of unconsciously evolving forms applied to society. It is not even the form itself that is beginning to be valued, but the rapidity with which forms change and spread; it is not by chance that the key word of modern society is the notorious ‘dynamism’. The freedom to believe and work, which our ancestors cherished, has turned out to be the freedom of atoms, the right to spin chaotically. In this madness, however, there is a consistency. A few centuries ago, the struggle was precisely for the right to express certain contents; over time, the positive goal was forgotten, and only the demand for freedom of expression as such remained.  The argument was about human dignity, but we came, to use Dostoevsky’s words, to ‘the right to dishonour’. The very subject of the dispute disappeared. We were talking about other ways of educating a higher man, not about rejecting the ideas of growth and self-restraint, but we came to the opposite: to liberation from all limitations, from the very craving for the highest. We have not yet realised that we have not merely sacrificed morality for freedom — some people are aware of this — but that for freedom we have sacrificed the spiritual growth of generations and the whole future of mankind. Having freed the individual from moral conflicts, we have preferred the short-term animal welfare of the masses to a long and difficult growth.

Does morality exist in the world, or is it some inner illusion unique to our souls? There are different answers to this question. I would say that there is a subtle, hard to grasp, but observable moral order in the world. At the very least it can be said that truth and beauty are more durable than ugliness and falsehood, and if they do not provide their proponents with immediate and permanent protection by cosmic forces, they undoubtedly influence the life of actors and the durability of their actions. Only that is durable which is based on truth. It is impossible to prove the contrary. Falsehood is punished quickly, so quickly that already children are watching how the deeds of their fathers collapse. The whole question is how we understand this moral world order. The materialist might say that the structure of the human mind is predetermined from the beginning of the ages, that it can only think as it thinks — in short, everything in the plan of the universe is predetermined, and our values as well. Such an objection is quite possible, but the materialist who raises it would be a bad materialist. To say that the moral law is inherent in the universe and has been imprinted in it since the beginning of time is to do a disservice to materialism with its firm rejection of any kind of non-material values; such a materialist would be stoned… though something like this, it must be admitted, has already been said — all sorts of things are done to circumvent the awful, unpleasant question of God and higher values.

Personal morality

Let’s talk about morality as it manifests itself in everyday life. And it has a place everywhere, contrary to prevailing opinion. I put the shame of a liar above impassioned truthfulness, because shame has the property of pushing further. The moral state of one who is ashamed is less apprehensive than shameless virtue… Even seducers always seek chastity in order to seduce it, thereby recognising that the mere existence of innocence gives them value. Moral corruption loses its value if it is not a condition exceptional and pursued. But it can no longer be regarded as impossible, however, that state when there are no more unseduced persons left. What will shamelessness do then? Probably, out of boredom, it will begin to be ashamed.

Our time, and any other, is probably hostile to the non-seduced. The unwillingness to follow the common vices and virtues is disliked by the crowd. A righteous person is that person who does not share with the crowd ‘neither laughter nor roar’; the same person under other circumstances is called a sinner. Following one’s conscience is usually a challenge to society, but even not to be perfect, but only to be different, is criminal in the eyes of the majority. And how can we reconcile this with the education of children, whose task is to teach the child to be different, i. e. to be himself (because ‘I’ am always ‘other’ in relation to everything that is ‘not me’).

What is kindness? Kindness as a moral quality is strength without cruelty. Where there is no strength, one cannot speak of goodness; it is manifested only in action; the powerless does not act. The opposition between strength and kindness is meaningless, because it implies necessarily evil force. The historical fate of goodness is not defeat at all. Only it has the property of accumulating in generations, but evil has no past, it is always quite modern. We can say that man finds evil ready, but good is not.

Immorality strives for preaching and conversions almost more than virtue. The libertine is always lonely and uncomfortable as long as purity is around him. He calms down only when everyone is equalised with him and even the shadow of comparative evaluation disappears. Generally speaking, any majority knows that the refusing, secluded is always morally superior, and that is why they pursue him so much. To refuse is difficult, and therefore moral; for the same reason the feat as an overcomed difficulty is moral. The natural human tendency is not to refuse, but to acquiesce. However, refusal in itself is not the highest moral value, but only a measure of moral fitness.

Speaking of moral judgements, it should be noted that it is not sainthood, but the moral middle, mediocrity, that is most prone to such ones, and more to condemnations. Perfectly moral men, as well as conscientious sinners (from whom, however, moral men are recruited, because one can speak of morality only in relation to one who has known temptation; children, say, are pure, but not moral), are few; the majority is made up of men of moderate vices. But this moderate majority judges harshly.

And judgement is often false. A ‘good person’ is a person whose actions are not difficult to understand. Having a certain talent is very difficult to combine with the name of ‘good person’, and the greater the talent, the more doubts will be in the evaluators and interpreters. The inner complexity of the personality prevents, you see, an easy understanding of its mental movements. To be ‘good’ requires sufficient inner uncomplicatedness, even inexperience. Any new knowledge of man, such as that with which we are enriched by Pushkin or Dostoevsky, either harms the soul of the cogniser, or is hard on it, but in any case deprives it of its innocence and the right to be called ‘good’.

The saint reproaches himself for everything, the child for nothing. Ordinary morality lies between the two, but truly in the moral realm only the extremes are good. Average morality, with its capacity for endless stretching and eternal violation of the commandment ‘thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil’ is as unpleasant as haughty ‘righteousness’, which is often confused with holiness, its opposite: instead of reproaching himself, the ‘righteous’ reproaches others. In general, the moral level of a person is determined by his inability to feel himself a victim and make others victims. A man of high mental qualities suffers more than others, but at the same time does not feel most unhappy, and at the same time, as far as possible, does not make others unhappy. Children see the sign of courage in the ability to ‘not complain’; morality is also the ability to suffer — and not to complain, to walk in darkness — and to shine light on others.

And there are two morals: voluntary and coerced. Voluntary and forced morality are very different in price. However, man is very often too highly developed to be moral under compulsion and not developed enough to be moral voluntarily. Here is the domain of freedom and of the greatest torment; there is no way back from it, into the world of coercive morality and voluntary vice. Of the man who is here, the apostle Paul exclaimed, ‘For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. O! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’

Is it good to be moral? Is there any good in truth? Injustice is punished, but truth has no place to lay its head. Be a liar, and you will be punished by God; be a prophet, that is, a servant of truth, and you will be punished by the world. Only the middle equidistant from truth and falsehood can be serene, but he who chooses to serve, chooses also to be punished: serving the one, he will suffer punishment from the other. It should be said: the more truth is contained in a given life, the less serene it is. Prophets are stoned; poets are oppressed on every side; but who is more worthy of pity — they or those who have never been stoned or oppressed?

It is not those deeds that are morally good for which we will be rewarded, but those that make us better. Morality is thus logically indefinable, that is, not morality even, but goodness: it is non-derivative and cannot be defined through anything external. Attempts to justify morality through ‘reasonable egoism’, ‘happiness of the majority’ or even ‘not doing stupid things’ (which seems to me quite stupid) have failed, and it turns out that in today’s world it is not justified by anything. As a matter of fact, man no longer has any basis for being good. He is, however, required to respect government authority, family, society, and property, and these are the only grounds of morality he has left. ‘Do what you like, but only pay your taxes!’ is how this serving morality can be expressed. The disadvantage of this morality is that it has only a restraining power, and that only in a narrowly limited area; it forbids some things but encourages nothing, and it forbids only overt, i. e., socially punishable acts. In essence, this morality protects society, but not the soul, while real morality cares first of all about the soul.

Are freedom and conscience related? It is a difficult question.  Half-jokingly, half-seriously we can say that in hell every devil enjoys complete freedom and is quite independent of others. Morality of an individual, however, can be both of daemonic and of the opposite kind — that is, from the same basis of loneliness and non-involvement can be made different conclusions. Morality does not follow from the social structure after all, but an individual’s position in society influences his or her moral choices. Our actions are free, but our possibilities are limited by circumstances. The perfect independence of the individual, moral and economic, which could only be dreamed of in the past, has become possible, and has opened before the individual either the path of higher development, the means to which are given by such independence, or the path of extreme selfishness, ‘life for oneself’, encouraged by modern society — the daemonic path.

Evil is not an abstract word or a legal concept. ‘Evil’ is that which harms the doer.  Only a shallow soul can be evil without harming itself. For a gifted person, evil is necessarily the path to failure in deeds or to inner unsettlement. With villainy is compatible only genius of the lowest order, some extraordinary mental ability, developed in addition to the soul. On the other hand, real evil is voluntary. To be evil is to possess value, but to direct it falsely; the opposite of evil is not good, but truth.

A person who has lost his soul or is on the way to losing it is dangerous because for him there are no more goods in this world, he does not find satisfaction in anything and needs only more and more acute stimuli that replace the lost feelings of joy and fullness of being. Loss of soul is precisely the state of loss of goods and values, when nothing pleases, alarms and allures; thirst without quenching. In this state, a new, very special view of suffering is born, which modernity instils in man. He is taught to look curiously at other people’s pain and at the same time to expect all sorts of pleasures for himself, even more: he is taught that ‘pleasure’ is always for me, and ‘suffering’ is always for others. This is not a ‘simple’ view at all, not a ‘natural’ view at all. Its only merit, if I may say so, is only that it is the opposite of the Christian view; it is, in fact, what a Christian would unmistakably and immediately call the devil’s view of things. ‘Pleasure to me, suffering to others’. To this they want to accustom man, and those parts of the world which still speak of their commitment to freedom are the furthest advanced in this direction; but this freedom, as it seems, is freedom without conscience, that is, — such is the arithmetic of morality — pure evil. There is a very different example in this area: Christ, for whom there were no foreign wounds. To develop in oneself a universal, all-human responsiveness, in which the wounds of humanity become personal wounds, means to come extremely close to Christ. Dostoevsky possessed this responsiveness, that is why he pointed to it as a distinctive feature of the Russian man… But such responsiveness brings a lot of grief to the soul. Pain here, as elsewhere, is the price to be paid for higher abilities.

Evil in the world

So, evil and delusion are actively involved in human history. There is no boundary, no limit placed on delusion, contrary to the common belief in ‘progress’ and ‘reason’. ‘The age of reason’ means: ‘there will be no more delusion’. It was once added: ‘and evil will lose its power’. For it was believed that evil was the result of an unwillingness to obey reason. Now they do not say so, because they know that reason does not protect from evil, on the contrary, willingly serves it… But they still believe in the cessation of delusions, in the infallibility of the mind. The truth, however, is that evil and delusion will never disappear from history, and the need to recognise evil and falsehood will not be abolished either. It is rather childish to think that from a certain age man becomes infallible in judgement. Yet European humanity believes in the infallibility of its judgements: the self-confidence of the adolescent! Never, I say: never will evil and delusion pass from history, and there will always be on the individual the responsibility of distinguishing between good and evil, however well and reasonably justified that evil may be. Even otherwise it should be said: there is not, has not been, and will not be anything before which one can bow down as truth, just because this is the opinion of the Roman bishop, of the holy and cathedral Church, of ‘world science’ or of ‘reason’ itself. No science, no ‘progress’ will ever free individuals and whole epochs from the ability to choose false paths and to be maliciously misguided.

’Evil’ is not too strong a word; not a measure of the intolerance of the judge. The rejection of certain judgements in the realm of good and evil only at first appears conciliatory. A benign tolerance sooner or later passes into outright condoning of evil. Undoubtedly, only goodness has a creative and fertilising power; only goodness holds up every human endeavour that wants to be lasting; but goodness acts slowly and gradually, because it does not seek power and is not selfish; evil — and this is what the advocates of ‘tolerance’ forget — needs immediate success, power and authority here and now. To be moral — let me put it another way (modernity is afraid of this word): in order not to see one’s children corrupted, one needs a certain amount of intolerance to evil, at least stubbornness.

Where light leaves, darkness immediately follows, without any effort on our part. Evil expands as far as possible, filling the empty spaces left by good. There is nothing ‘indifferent’. Either light is on guard or darkness takes its place. The consistent expulsion of light from culture and its replacement by exclusively applied values leads to a gradual darkening of society, to a terrible twilight. Even malicious counterfeits of higher values, it should be noted, have a protective power. What matters is not the direction in which they take the spirit, but the tension they impart to it. Even the delusions of the mind and heart are better than their satiated inactivity. In a soul filled with thought and passion, it is harder for evil to find a place.

Satan (or, if you prefer, evil) takes an active part in the events of this world, and his victory is much closer and more possible than it seemed a hundred years ago. In fact, there is nothing to be surprised about: the activity of evil in the world was not a secret even for our distant ancestors. Another thing is surprising: the fact that Evil does not realise that its victory on earth will mean failure, unsuccess and subsequently the death of the human race. It has the power to win, but it is unable to make use of the victory. This is what makes the sober observer of the wiles of evil wonder. It is not only not a mystery, but simply obvious that the final detachment of man from the divine, i. e. from his eternal roots, will lead him to decline and final fall, but evil stubbornly pursues this goal, not realising that the enslaved humanity will not long please it by its obedience. This is probably the general rule: evil is sophisticated but shortsighted. Victory for it is a self-sufficient value for the sake of which everything is permissible, and on the way to this victory, evil is irresistible, but it is unable to hold it or use it. If this is the general rule, then even in the most extreme circumstances we still have hope.

We can also say this: good is already there, but evil is only looking for incarnation. It has only a thirst for being, which it cannot quench. Weak and threatened, powerless and unarmed good stands firmly in the world: it is served, for him they sing in church, it speaks in the souls of poets: everything that is not done with all the soul and all the heart — is done for it. How not to envy it! Has evil ever been sung or dreamt for? Having no power to be, evil is borrowed by reflected light. If we define good as unbreakable truth and beauty, in evil this bond is irreparably broken and under no circumstances can be reunited. Evil can appeal to our sense of the beautiful — but it is obliged by the force of things to lie shamelessly; it can also tell the truth, but its deeds will be doomed to ugliness. In this latter case, however, it has to use a carefully selected truth, and incessantly suggest to the masses that only the ugly can be true, and that truth is always ugly. However, evil does the same in relation to beauty, assuring that beauty is always extra-moral, if not immoral, and that everything moral is dull, vulgar and boring, thus giving amoralism the appearance of striving for beauty… In general, the path of evil is the path of constant substitutions.

Evil comes in tidal waves, and its onslaught seems irresistible, but for all the apparent power of evil — it is without a trace on earth. ‘Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge’, but we have nothing to learn from evil, and while good has a history and a past, evil is always now, and its resemblance to what has gone before is a blind repetition, not a sign of heredity and kinship. Only good influences can be traced in history. Each nation and epoch has its own evil, neither ancestors nor descendants. But for this groundlessness and tracelessness it is endowed with terrible power. Good is given eternity, but (and because of that!) it is easy, for a while or for a long time, to oust it from the earth. Evil is ghostly, its whole existence is here and now, from sunrise to sunset, but (and therefore!) it is ruthless in attack and desperate in defence. ‘I have eternity’, says the Good, and retreats into the shadows. ‘I have only one day’, Evil says to itself and advances confidently, feeling the cold and emptiness behind it.

Threatened Evil, unlike Good, prefers to defend itself to the last. Good can surrender, if only because it does not believe in the possibility of its ultimate defeat; but evil, it seems, knows something about such a possibility, and it defends itself desperately. At all times, interventions against good have been more successful.

Evil has a constant need for self-defence, now and then turning into an attack. In fact, that’s what defines it. The need for self-defence, which turns into an open attack, is the first sign of evil in general. Good is defenceless, defends reluctantly and does not attack first. A metaphysician would say that evil is driven by the will for lifetime victory, fuelled by the certainty that he will have no future life; good, — such a metaphysician would say — believes in eternal life and is not afraid of lifetime, i. e. temporary, trials.

We are less prepared for the encounter with Evil than any previous generation, primarily because we — for the most part — do not accept its existence, do not believe in Satan, and, when confronted with his direct works and servants, underestimate the threat. What was self-evident to the Middle Ages seems incredible to us; we are willing to see only the malevolence of individuals where something much deeper is involved. In essence, we believe that man is good by nature, that no one commits evil of his own free will, but only through lack of enlightenment and unfavourable circumstances — even if we have never read Rousseau or Marx. We are unbearable and unrestrained optimists about human nature, and that is too bad, because it is we — and even more our immediate descendants — who are destined to encounter conscious and powerful evil. We are accustomed to believe that man is good, but he can come to bad opinions, which will make him dangerous… Evil, therefore, we see only in opinions, in thoughts, while it lies deeper — in the realm of the spirit. We can discern signs of this kind perhaps worse than the Jews of Christ’s time, of whom it was said: ‘Ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times’. The sad and indisputable truth that we must either recognise God or Satan, for ‘it is impossible to serve two masters’ is not known to us. We hope to find a warm place somewhere between the struggling sides, where we can live at our own pleasure, enjoying both the glitter of the sun and the play of shadows, depending on our mood, but there is no such place. No matter how much we want to be alone (and the dream of the latest Western humanity is all about solitude and strength, just like the Adolescent in Dostoevsky’s novel), there will still be someone else with us.

Truth and beauty. Human nature

There is a connection between the sense of truth and the sense of beauty, by virtue of which the high is beautiful and the beautiful is high. Aesthetics is inseparable from morality. It is often thought that morality is temporal and place-dependent, that is, it cannot be a measure of something, but morality is certainly not a measure of beauty. I argue only that the levels of beauty and morality fall and rise at the same time; a change in one means a change in the other. On the other hand, what is valued in a relationship with conscience is not its exact instructions, but the willingness to follow them.

Here the question is important: can conscience be inspired by the ugly; is morality based on ugliness possible? It is easy to deflect it by pointing out that both the beautiful and the moral, the bad and the ugly, cannot be determined except through man… but I suspect, and this suspicion has fuelled religion since its inception, that if not the moral, the b    eautiful does not depend on man for its existence. From social or sexual relations one may try to produce conscience, but not beauty. It is blatantly useless to society or sex, although the idleness inherent in wealth or the sensitivity which love gives is favourable to the sense of beauty.

Why are these questions so important? Why do we need to know the reasons for our perception of truth and beauty? Because by wrong explanations of the causes of actions, the actions themselves are destroyed. Explaining higher mental phenomena through lower motives terminates these phenomena themselves. Who will be noble, if nobility — only well-hidden pride? Who will be generous if generosity is only a cover of greed? It is easier to be open ly proud and self-loving… False explanations of human nature are dangerous because in time they corrupt the person being explained. His behaviour becomes so distorted that it finally begins to correspond to its explanation; in general, the behaviour of man and society most often corresponds to the prevailing worldview, i. e. to the way of explaining things. In other words, the explanations of man and society have a coercive power in certain circumstances; I would say, the simpler they are, the greater; so one should be very careful when proposing a new comprehensive solution to the riddle of man. It is not difficult to corrupt society by offering it a false view of itself.

However, in striving for truth and beauty, we are forced to admit that in a whole range of things truth and beauty are joined to some hard-to-define poison — and yet we continue to desire them. This question tormented Leo Tolstoy; Tolstoy even thought he had ‘solved’ it: through cutting off the relevant desires and refusing to see truth and beauty in the object of those desires. ‘It is nasty. Nature itself has made it nasty. Gross and ugly’. Tolstoy’s usual confusion of concepts: for nature is neither nasty nor ugly; it is not moral. If we take away the reference to ‘nature’, we can also take away the reference to ugliness — Dostoevsky said a lot of useful and profound things on this subject. Remember Mitya Karamazov about the ideal of Madonna and the ideal of Sodom: ‘Is beauty in Sodom? Believe that it is in Sodom for the vast majority of people — did you know this secret or not?’ Here, too, there is a kind of metaphysics, the metaphysics of sex. After all, the experiences of love, temptation, and passion do not follow from the movements of proteins and hormones, but only accompany them. If the concept of beauty had a ‘natural’ origin, it would be universal and unchanging. In fact, being a phenomenon of spiritual life, the concept of beauty is changeable, subject to development, and only in the higher peoples tends to uniformity — at the summits of development, where the spiritual nature of beauty is clarified. However, even here, hand in hand with beauty enters temptation — a subtle, barely perceptible poison that passes through the last sieve….

Pleasure

This subtle, elusive poison is called pleasure. There are higher pleasures and there are lower pleasures.

Pleasures are divided into lower and higher not because some of them are ‘immoral’ and others are not. The pleasures of the spirit are pleasures of growth and development; the lower pleasures have an annihilating character towards the one who experiences them. The end point of the lower pleasures is self-destruction; the end of the pleasures of the spirit, if it can be imagined, would be sobriety and fullness of being, being in all its possible measure. We may say more: the spirit in man is that which seeks life. The highest aims of the spirit are not suicidal. The sinner approaches death to the extent that he neglects the spirit, that is, he seeks annihilating boons. The pursuit of these annihilating boons marks certain epochs in the life of mankind.

In the area of sensual love we sin insofar as we are incapable of pure joy. Anything without joy is sin. There is no shame in the self-indulgent games of youth, but only where those games are truly self-indulgent. We sin exactly as much as we are not children. What does it mean, then, to be ‘without sin’? Abstinence? Mortification of the flesh? But children do not abstain or mortify the flesh, but are sinless. So why? Because they play and rejoice; but voluptuousness — I return to where I started — voluptuousness is the furthest thing from play and joy. It is all intentional and selfish, and the word ‘unintentional’ does not fit it at all. ‘Unintentional’ means without sin.

…But here is the question: Is joy always pure? Or, as a man of the Middle Ages would ask: can daemons rejoice? According to the inner feeling (which may be wrong, although there is no other guide in these matters) — it seems that joy already presupposes purity of feeling; that any dark admixture of it belittles it — to the degree of pleasure, enjoyment, etc. Here is one of the questions on which — so to speak, walking around — Rozanov stumbled. Here is a chain of successive transformations: joy — pleasure — enjoyment — satiation — consumption… On one side there is no sin, on the other side there is. If this is the case, then Rozanov in the bright part of his writings was not wrong, and pure, without any sin are many such things, which we are accustomed to approach with caution, as possibly dangerous to the soul. It is true that this sinlessness is given under the difficult, almost impossible condition, ‘become as little children’. ‘Everyone is worthy of love’, said Wilde, ‘except him who thinks that he is’. Something similar here: all joys may be pure — but only for those who do not seek them deliberately and selfishly; all is good that comes unintentionally. Paradise is near — one might exclaim — but also immensely far away, since we are all accustomed to ‘achieving what we desire’, and where desire is, there is intention, ‘what I deserve, I will take’… and paradise is far away again. It keeps seeming to me that the author of ‘Solitaria’ is partly right, and quite a lot of things are sinless and pure, but on terms, at a price we most often don’t know how to pay: ‘become as little children’.

’And everything will be holy, because everything will be with the fear of God’ — in this thought Rozanov is strong, almost invincible. Unfortunately, he did not insist on this particular formulation. The way Rozanov usually expressed himself made one think that he sees holiness where one usually finds its opposite. His other thought, however, more subtle and hidden under a bark of crude and exaggerated assertions, was that everything is holy that is done with the fear of God, including the life of sex. Not ‘sex is holy because it brings one closer to God’ (as Rozanov usually put it), but everything is holy, or at least good, that is done with the remembrance of God, including earthly love. Whether this is the case in reality is open to question. I sometimes think it may be so. When expressing his thoughts in this way, Rozanov turns from an anti-Christian [1] into something quite different, because the ideal of the integral sanctification of earthly life is not alien to Christianity at all, although it is sadly aware that there is a rift in the world, evil is freely operating in it… But Rozanov himself expressed his thoughts in this way, as far as I know, almost once. Feeling and sensuality usually led him much further, into the realm of dark dreams.

The immediate feeling is that somewhere in the depths the soul is twofold between the divine and the earthly, trembling at its root and tilting to one side or the other… As if a wind were passing over it. The roots of the ‘carnal’, i. e., primarily of the sex, are there in the dark depths; and for a sprout wavering at its base, to which the soul may be compared, the ‘carnal’ as we know it is too coarse and material, an echo of something else in our denser air. It is a common mistake for the mind, if it recognises any significance for the carnal, for sex, to think that the centre, the source of sensation, is ‘up here’, above, in the games of the flesh (on this path one can go as far as to venerate the phallus in the Rozanov’s or Freudian version), but in fact the opposite is true: our material ‘carnal’ is only an echo of something much more subtle, immaterial and profound. In this case, the life of the sex turns out to be a material manifestation of non-material beginnings, just like — scary to say — our religion. Here is the stone on which the St. Petersburg sage slipped. Something is quietly ringing in the depths, we hear the bell and go to the sound, and we never come, since the call comes from the depths to which there is no way. In this understanding (in which I myself, however, am not quite sure) ‘sex’ as an instrument of procreation and ‘sex’ as a phenomenon of the soul life must be separated, though not completely, because here and there there are mixtures, the spirit acts in the flesh, and the flesh influences the spirit. Something similar, it seems, was defended by Plato… In any case, for a person who sees only the ‘physiological’ side, the ‘play of hormones’ in experiences connected with sex, a whole series of questions, a whole series of connexions of the soul life will remain unnoticed and unexplained: love — beauty — morality — sin — delight — ugliness… For him all this is only, in the expression of our rather shameless time, ‘sexual life’, for which ‘correct methods’ are preached. And even more must be said, even more paradoxically: coitus, about the ‘correctness of the conduct’ (i. e. ensuring the greatest pleasure) of which our humane time is so concerned, does not yet mean the life of sex. It is possible (indeed, now I speak like Rozanov) to have coitus, but not to have the life of the sex, but only physiological acts — due to one’s own immaturity, since everything in the world requires maturity. This applies first of all to the unfortunate children of the era of unlimited ‘sexual freedom’. They have everything, except Eros and love….

To doubt the value of pleasure, pleasure alone is not enough. It takes a very great clarity of consciousness combined with a very great depth of enjoyment, which is not possible for everyone. This is what distinguishes Dostoevsky’s characters. Otherwise, there is no question here. Only those for whom both abysses are equally indisputable can see the question. If one or the other is not clear enough in the consciousness, and either sex or spirit can be downgraded to ‘secondary’ — then, of course, it is quite possible to maintain moral equilibrium, serenity and a mocking or contemptuous view of ‘these prudes’ or ‘these libertines’…

Enjoyment, in the most general sense, is that which brings us (or seems to us to bring us) closer to the fullness of life. Unfortunately, the greatest sins against one’s own soul are committed in the pursuit of fullness of life. And in general, sinfulness and this sought and not found fullness are somehow connected. Inner emptiness is invisibly and firmly bound up with the desire to fill oneself at all costs, and the more acute this desire, the less worthy the filling the personality finds. Apparently, in the area of fullness of life — only those who do not seek find it; only those who do not ask are answered. The longing for fullness is never satisfied, or rather, the greater the desire, the uglier and more distorted will be its fulfilment. Why? I would say: because the fullness of life is within us, and any striving outside only distances us from it… Our life is already full, in any case, it already contains the possibility of fullness, and only by making efforts we manage to escape from it. Many people succeed, and then they break back into the doors of their souls, but these doors are already closed.

Spirit and religion

In the very midst of enjoyment we notice that we are endowed not only with body but also with spirit. There is no escape from it. We have no choice but to be spiritual beings. Otherwise — horror, animal longing without animal joys, a black meaningless whirlpool… The highest abilities require the owner to be religious or mad; one cannot be ‘just a man’, or rather ‘just a man’, the ideal of the average human condition, one can only be with average abilities. Where abilities are higher than average, there is no possibility of inner equilibrium on such a precarious support as ‘common sense’ or ‘natural inclinations’. There man recognises the madness of ‘sense’ and the aimlessness of ‘ inclinations’, though he does not become a saint because of this, but continues, with even greater fervour, to think and to be carried away.

The spirit, however, is not a two-coloured chessboard.  In the realm of the spirit, in addition to good and evil, there is also the realm of emptiness; in itself it is neither good nor evil, but only the soil for idleness and corruption. The idle spirit seeks to fill itself and chooses the most accessible, so the vast wastelands of idle souls are sown, and the grown tares are later declared ‘the culture of the masses’ and ‘a new word in the history of the spirit’… What is wrong with innocent weeds, in the simple desires to ‘to eat, and to drink, and to be merry’? What is wrong with them is that these innocent weeds grow up to the sky, obscure the sky and give those who get lost in them an excuse to claim that there is no sky at all. It is not immoral to rejoice, but after a certain limit, every new joy for oneself means grief for others, i. e. joy becomes immoral; and there is a further limit, beyond which the search for joy begins to harm the soul that seeks joy, and if hitherto other people’s pain has been unheard, now it becomes acquainted with pain itself. The search for joy dries up the source of joy while encouraging thirst. The extreme point on this path is the infinitely thirsty one at the dried up stream.

Spiritual growth can be looked upon as expanding the scope of shame. Children and savages have almost nothing to be ashamed of; the higher the inner development, the more occasions for shame it gives to man. If a society rejects shame, it is on the road to a primitive state, in spite of its technical successes. However, no society can completely abandon shame: it needs at least some serving virtues as bonds, without which the state becomes a den of robbers… Fortunately, shame retains its importance for the individual longer than for society, so even very corrupt societies can continue to exist, relying on the despised feelings of individuals. Shamelessness as a dominant idea even assumes that apart from the chosen shameless, there will remain masses committed to obsolete virtues.

Rozanov, like many other critics of Christianity, had no idea what would happen when Christian values — the values of self-restraint — were removed from the world. It is good and safe to preach the richness of life and the fullness of desire, in short, all ‘on the other side of good and evil’, while living in a society that suppresses and ennobles the baser inclinations — or, avoiding moral judgement, all selfish inclinations that have no truth, love, or beauty in them. Living in such a well-ordered society, one can see, if one wishes, in Christ ‘the extinguisher of the fullness of life’… But to us, the victims of the revolution, who have lost this well-ordered society, we can see the core, the secret foundation of Christian values: self-restraint, without which all aspirations are equally considered worthy, still deserving of satisfaction. It is not that ‘one cannot be joyful’, but that joy is not a self-sufficient value on the way to which everything can be neglected. Either reasonable self-restraint or ‘all needs must be met’. By rejecting self-restraint, we remove all coercive authority from society and put everything at the mercy of the individual. This is ‘progress in the human realm’, as modernity understands it. What is usually presented as enlightenment, ‘the struggle between science and faith’, is in fact a struggle against thinking based on unchangeable thoughts about unchangeable things. For some reason, the eradication of immutable values and the widespread imposition of one’s own opinions are considered important, when in 9 cases out of 10 people do not even have a reason to develop these ‘own opinions’. I remain convinced that this movement of worldwide flattery of personal opinion, if not driven by considerations of convenience in controlling the human soul, has ultimately led to a much greater pliability of the masses. The greater the human conceit, the easier it is to control that person. It is most difficult to impose acts unnatural to him on a conscientious modest man, and it is not difficult to control a proud man. The recent revolutionary era has greatly exalted human conceit, while undermining the human ability to judge.

The fullness of earthly life, in the meagre degree to which it is available to us, does not give the soul satisfaction. It is pointless to move further in this direction: there is nothing ahead. And even where this fullness of earthly life is present, it does not mean the embodiment of higher values, which was not felt at all — again I am getting into an argument with him — by Rozanov, who lived as if Christ had never come, like some Assyrian or ancient Jew. Fullness of life is not a sign of divine approval. Leo Tolstoy spent his whole life in search of ‘goodness’, but it was only a word, which hid a very different moral content from that which is usually put into it. ‘Good’ was, as Leo Shestov pointed out, in fact tranquillity, an opportunity to take refuge from the horror and imperfection of life. The good has little to do with this goal of Tolstoy. ‘How do I live so that I do not constantly experience a gnawing sense of the futility of life?’ is not the same as ‘how do I behave in order to be moral’. A moral person is concerned with achieving certain goals; here it was not a question of achieving goals, but of finding them…

What values can we look for — and hope to find? Perhaps Christian values are the last values a soul can have in an unfriendly world. I even think that there can be no more ‘new word’, no more additions in the realm of values. ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’. Either we find our values outside or inside. The values of victories and triumphs, ambition and pride — as the ancient world understood them and as the modern West (in its most visible and loudest part) understands them — are all external. I think there is nothing outside of this opposition between external and internal, except the absence of values in general. Either we do something for ourselves and our souls, or for some external idols, be it fame, approval, might or power. This is where the main divide comes in. Which side we choose depends on our idea of morality and truth. In the first case we recognise the independence of truth and the primacy of morality; in the second, we suppose moral that which leads to success, and true that which gives the greatest power. We have a conscience so long, and only so long, as the consequences of actions are more important to us than the actions themselves; likewise, the sincere pursuit of truth is possible only so long as we believe that truth precedes our search and is not created by our minds out of nothing. There is no ‘progress’ in the realm of the spirit, but only the possibility of choice and the willingness to follow one’s choice to the end.

I say this without in any way sympathising with Tolstoy’s ‘struggle with the flesh’. If the spiritual consisted simply in tiredness of the flesh, i. e., if it were an expression like ‘man minus the flesh’, it would be worthless. ‘Man minus the flesh’ is what modern ‘psychology’ does — a mere aggregate of nervous irritations… Spirit is that which is higher than man, that which is greater than the sum of the parts, i. e. unattainable by simple subtraction, and it is on this arithmetical action that all morality, such as the teaching of Leo Tolstoy, pins its hopes. That Leo Tolstoy is not a Christian was guessed by his contemporaries, despite all the Count’s attempts to interpret the Gospel. But it should be said more: Christianity calls for all spiritual fullness, to what is directly opposed to the reduction, simplification of man in the name of morality [2]. Here is the fundamental divergence of Christianity from all morality, even stronger: Christianity is non-moral, and morality can be Christian only in its positive part, in the field of exhortations to the best. Christianity accepts the whole man, but says: ‘Look, do not burden your spirit with this and that: there is nothing bad in it, but your soul will attach itself to unnecessary things and will never be able to leave, so it will remain a slave of unnecessary things’. Morality shouts to the same person from the doorstep: ‘Get away, get away, you impure! Fulfil my prescriptions first, especially this and that, and only then come, and if what is impossible for you, try to keep your weakness a secret!’ There is very, very little in common between Christianity and morality. Hence the necessity for the moralist — I return to Count Leo Tolstoy — to distort the New Testament. ‘Better with morality, but without God’, says the hardened moralist, and treats God with great suspicion, exactly as the Pharisees, the most ancient moralists, treated Christ.

And worst of all: there can be no ‘choice’ between the spirit and the flesh. There are two natures in us, and the roots of good and evil are equally rooted in the deep. The question is, how to live with these two natures and the unchanging sway between them? The human soul looks like a bow, drawn taut to send an arrow equally far but in different directions. Good and evil, higher and lower, human and animal, divine and human — whatever you call these two orders of values, they are equally rooted in us, and the greater the impulse towards one, the greater the recoil and counter-movement towards the other — but only in one direction: the ‘recoil’ is always directed from the higher to the lower, never vice versa. It is only for the best in us that we pay for impulses of a different kind; in the language of the Church, temptation only hinders righteous deeds; but righteousness is never a temptation and a stumbling block to the wicked. This is all that we can confidently say about morality. ‘The great righteous and the great sinners are moulded of the same dough’, said Clive Staples Lewis. And how to live with this knowledge? ‘Be good and reasonable’, lukewarm morality advises us; but morality is unreasonable, it is already obvious — anything but moral behaviour is reasonable; and goodness… goodness, as Dostoevsky has shown us (if any witnesses are needed) is always accompanied by temptation. And again we come back to Christ: ‘the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force’. This is not at all, not at all the same as ‘being reasonable and good’…

It is possible — in words, of course — to abolish completely the concepts of good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly, to ‘re-evaluate all values’ and become ‘on the other side of good and evil’, but only in words. These categories are not a figment of our imagination, they exist in reality, and the proof is their immiscibility. Declare the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false to be equally worthy (as democracy does, for which these are all just ‘opinions’ and there will be not an even mixture of both, as one might think, but pure, blatant ugliness and lies. One can deny both truth and beauty in words, but there will be an inevitable reckoning: the triumph of the false and the ugly. This is a fact, not an assumption; one can only interpret this fact in different ways. Firstly, we can say that evil and ugliness are natural values to which the ‘liberated’ humanity returns. We can also say that truth and beauty are the values of growth, labour and effort, inaccessible to the idle, irresponsible and selfish mind. At present, the first explanation undoubtedly prevails. If Vladimir Soloviov ironically expressed his nihilistic faith with the words: ‘Man descended from an ape, therefore let us love each other’, nowadays much more is tacitly implied: ‘Man is an evil, deceitful, cruel, lustful creature, therefore a brilliant future awaits him’. This formula, however, is so false that even in the gullible West of our days they are more willing to believe in the near end of the world than in this brilliant future…

Such a ‘creed’ cannot last long. The worship of evil in all its manifestations, i. e. ultimately — let us call things by their proper names — Satan, is only good in a well-ordered and tranquil country, enjoying the comforts and peace of life. The restless interest in everything perverse, evil, cruel, which we observe in the countries of victorious freedom, speaks of its extreme satiety with purely material gifts. But a state of material abundance with extreme spiritual poverty [3] will not last forever, indeed it will not even last long enough. One does not need to be a prophet to predict the stopping of the wheel of production and consumption, which turns with such noise and splendour in the modern West, delighting our unwise compatriots… It is good to be bad from boredom, idleness and excess of prosperity. But something tells me that the excess of prosperity in those peoples who today wish to be the guides of humanity will not last long.

The question of why there is evil in the world, which has preoccupied so many philosophers, seems of secondary importance. By evil the world stands and is supported by evil, what else is there to ask? Much more curious, in my opinion, is the fact that, despite the fact that the world is easily turned to evil, there is good in it, and this good is indestructible. Here I see the real question. The difficulty is not how to reconcile the all-good God with the ungood universe, i. e. to create a ‘theodicy’, the difficulty (or rather joy, since we are looking at the matter from the opposite side) is the joy that in a world subject to evil there is a constant presence of good, persecuted, threatened, but not removed from the world by any efforts of evil. Few people today are engaged in theodicies, but almost everyone is convinced that evil is the soil and home of the human soul, and if not evil, then an extra-moral natural existence consisting in the devouring of the weak by the strong, which differs from evil in name alone. Thus the question of ‘theodicy’ — the reconciliation of the idea of an omnipotent God with the apparent power of evil — is replaced before our eyes by another question: the omnipotence of evil and the elusiveness of the world’s good. Continuing the lines of the figure, we must say that for the first time in history thought has asked the question of Satan’s omnipotence, and the very ‘interested person’ (as Vladimir Soloviov said about Antichrist) presents more and more new proofs of his power. When the question is posed in this way, the presence and indestructibility of good in the world looks like a very good sign, even if we have to imagine a struggling God — an image that did not come to mind in the Middle Ages (with its adherence to fixed forms) and the New Age (with its passion for optimistic constructions [4]). ‘And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not’ — perhaps there is no better way to express this thought.

Morality  and modernity

‘Morality’ (not as an external set of rules, but as our inner attitude to matters of good and evil) is going through bad times now.

If in the past they used to say ‘good and truth’, in the understanding of the modern age, truth has become completely separated from good. The good is tolerated only in the realm of wishes, not even as an ethical category, but as a set of benefits and conveniences. They are ready to recognise and seek only extra-moral truth, which would not oblige to anything and would mean nothing to the heart, and what is more, they believe that only extra-moral truth is possible. There are two ways out of the present situation. Either we should part with the good as it manifests itself in everyday life, and limit ourselves to comfort and profit, because no good can be based on ‘extra-moral truths’ — or we should dismiss these indifferent, if not outright dangerous ‘truths’ so valued by the epoch, turn inwards and look for other truths on which our existence could be based precisely as human life, and not as consumption and production of wealth… To all supporters of the first way I will say that they are preparing a cold, very cold world in which human life, love and hope will be cheap, in which man will feel himself dead for most of his life, and will be able to defend himself against the icy feeling of death only with more and more sensual pleasures, up to the ugliest ones. You will create, you are creating already now, a great emptiness in the souls, which cannot be filled by any delusions about the ‘power of man’ and the ‘conquest of nature’. The collective ‘omnipotence’ of mankind will mean little to the empty shell of the unfulfilled individual, which will be created — and is already being created — by the upheaval that is destroying the great human values. Everything will become ‘nothing’ in the world. The emptied world will yearn for death or the meaning of life, death or faith — to this question everything will be reduced when the last pleasures have been experienced and the last satisfaction has been obtained…

The world — the prosperous part of it — tries on a daemonic worldview. A keen interest in other people’s torment and their own pleasures, that is how this worldview can be defined. Curiosity for the daemonic in European art is not new. Even Byron and our Lermontov dressed up in a black cloak… But this was the daemonism of satiated individuals, while we observe, almost for the first time in history, the daemonism of the masses. Daemonic beginning in our time is felt clearly and everywhere, in the culture for the masses — especially. A person is being brought up who is cold and centred on himself, who avoids pain and is inclined to inflict pain on others on occasion — that is, in essence, an ordinary daemon, strange as it may sound; a daemon in the Christian sense of the word. Among the qualities of the new man called up, I forgot to mention the constant, unquenchable interest in cruelty, violence, murder and all kinds of torment — of course, when it comes to others [5] . An unquenchable thirst for the horrible is fostered, which, however, is disguised in the name of ‘interest in life as it is, unadorned’. The people, ostensibly, cannot be left in the dark, it is necessary to tell them the truth — and the people are informed selectively, bit by bit, with information that focuses attention on only the terrible, the disgusting, the ugly. Thousands of throats and feathers, obeying a mighty hand, lure the masses into the mire of ‘real life’ in which there is neither light nor joy. I can find no other word than ‘diabolical’ for the scheme to drive people into a world of horrors and dark pleasures, and would wish it to fail… But the matter has gone too far. European mankind has never been so unarmed against the devil and darkness as it is now, when it has quite lost the concept of God and light. Who now believes in God? But in turning away from God, man turns to the devil, and this quite irrespective of what he thinks of it.

How strange is the misunderstanding of our time of the simple truth that it is possible, as a steady state, either to be a man of spirit and conscience, or a pig. The transitional stage between them, the breeding of which the epoch is so proud of, is only an unviable crossbreed that will not survive in posterity. The good in this man still exists, and the bad (and very bad) — already, and was from the beginning. The world is saved from general savagery only by graduated changes. A succession of less and less morally fit generations is brought up day by day, and we do not see a direct transition from the well-bred but already morally lost Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov to Smerdyakov only because this transition is stretched out over decades. The meaning of the epoch is expressed by Dostoevsky. Where ‘there is no God’, ‘everything is allowed’, where everything is allowed — there are cattle in the place of man. What should fate beat you with, how should it punish you, so that you realise the great power of limitation in everything but the thirst for the best?

In fact, the great moral revolution of modern times, to which we owe the so-called ‘scientific worldview’, has been the abolition of judgement and the preaching of things without quality. One of the main consequences was the abolition of shame — at least, the creation of the possibility for the average person not to be ashamed at all. Conscience was neutralised and rendered silent. There was no shameful, no unnatural, and even less soul-damaging — this category was done away with before anything else — but only the ‘natural’. And the devilish meaning of this revolution, otherwise it could not be called, was that after a short time only the formerly shameful, harmful and lowly became considered ‘natural’. The abolition of moral evaluations led to the disappearance of the very qualities being evaluated — namely, the highest and positive ones. The rejection of judgements about good and evil turned out to be a rejection of goodness as such. We expected, of course, quite the opposite: we thought that good and evil were only arbitrarily given names, tablets with which man decorates the universe. But it turned out to be quite different. It turned out that good manifests itself in life exactly insofar as we are able to recognise, honour and worship it, and the refusal to make moral judgements does not just ‘free’ the human will, but frees it on the way to pure evil. This is what is meant by the great moral revolution brought about by men of scientific worldview and democratic convictions. The recognition of equal rights for evil and good (the basic belief of modern democracy) leads not to ‘their free competition’, but to the frank and brazen triumph of evil, because how can one ‘freely compete’ with evil!

One cannot help thinking that in our days someone’s invisible hand is leading mankind to a reconciliation with evil and its symbols. I am referring, of course, to Western humanity and Russia, which has joined it. The adversaries the West has had to face in the last century are still scarecrows for children, not because they served evil, but because they rebelled against the West. Some unprecedented alliance is being prepared between humanity and evil, which before, when it came to earth, was still a stranger and a violator… ‘On the other side of good and evil’ has grown a monstrous flower: a new morality, expressed in the words: ‘Evil is that which prevents me from defeating my enemy’. Power has taken the place of God, and pride has taken the place of conscience. The cultural values of the past are being recognised in such a limited way as to make them no more than curious trinkets of no use in the armoury into which the world is increasingly turning. And this movement, it seems to me, is inexorable. A big ship is harder to capsize than a small boat, but this ship is already lying on its side.  What does this era demand of us? Activity? Struggle? I think not. By virtue of its unfortunate adherence to majority voting as the final proof, it is defenceless against the evil that has already succeeded in gaining the support of that majority. No, not everyone in the current generations has succumbed yet — but they’re not being asked, are they? Democracy consists in the fact that the most important things are decided in secret, and the minor things are submitted to the general court. The concepts of good and evil are still alive, but even they cannot withstand the change of generations and the ever more powerful preaching of power and pleasure — a petty self-worship in which daemonism is more and more strongly recognised.

It is also worth saying that the daemonism of past centuries was a daemonism of action. Democracy, with its lowering of abilities and expansion of opportunities, produces the daemonism of consumption. Generally encouraged inactive passions and mindless knowledge, i. e. those that do not require any effort from the individual, do not force sacrifice anything, even just do not require strain… If the intellectual top of modern society rejects Christianity consciously, as an unnecessary burden of responsibility, the flock of the masses take the lack of moral values, spiritual emptiness for granted. Atheism owns the masses because of their indifference, not because of a conscious choice. The choice is made by a minority, an intellectual elite that has openly placed pride and power above humility and responsibility.

[1] It must be said that Rozanov’s ‘anti-Christianity’ is generally of a rather special shade. It was not because he opposed Christianity that he could not accept it, but because he did not find in it an abode for himself and his innermost aspirations. ‘Thou art rich and good, but not for me — so vanish thou altogether!’ It would not be so if Rozanov had really found a ‘new truth’ which abolishes all previous ones. In that case he would have no more curiosity about Christianity than he had about Darwin or Marx. But no! Christianity had been troubling Rozanov all along…

[2] I am not talking about the medieval Church with its demand for sad concentration, out of the denial of which came the rosy-cheeked and complacent society of the modern West. It was a one-sidedness punished, as is always the case, by another one-sidedness. The world has not become a monastery, but as punishment for this attempt, it is taking on the characteristics of a brothel before our eyes.

[3] Speaking of the spiritual and the ideological. In contemporary Russia, many people seem to believe that the defence against Western materialism can be a modified or fully restored ideology of revolutionary times. It isn’t. Many values have their lowly doppelgangers — Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos, and so on… The doppelganger of spirituality is ‘ideology‘. Ostensibly they are similar: here and there commitment to the immaterial, opposition to crude materialism. In fact, history, and the history of the Russian intelligentsia in the first place, shows that spirituality and ideology are different to the point of contradiction. The difference can be seen even from the use of words: there is ‘life of the spirit’ — and ‘service to the idea’. We live by one, we serve the other. Here and there, however, it is possible to neglect material values, only in one case for the sake of an external idol, and in the other — for the sake of one’s own soul. Sergei Bulgakov in his essay ‘Heroism and Asceticism’ described this external similarity with internal difference, and we know more about the subject. Communist rule in Russia encouraged precisely all kinds of heroism for the sake of idols imposed on the individual; self-denial to perdition, profoundly different from self-denial for the salvation of the soul. ‘You will perish; everyone will perish; it is better to perish by serving me!’, said the idol of the Revolution… The souls of millions were thrown into the fire, but not for the sake of purification, as has happened in human history, but solely with the promise of the last death. The tragedy of ‘Soviet power’ can only be understood religiously. It was an earthly religion with a reduction of all concepts, whose deity was embodied in the state, righteousness in service to the state, sin in disobedience; paradise was not promised at all, but hell was always in abundance. To be more precise, paradise was promised to be purely sensual and worldly, first soon, and then more and more distant in time… The ideology characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia from Pisarev to Lenin is not a weapon against the consumer materialism coming from the West, precisely because it was itself thoroughly materialistic, believing only in earthly power, primarily the power of state coercion.

[4] In the realm of thought, I honestly don’t like either optimists or pessimists. Pessimists, those frankly do not believe in God, and optimists tend to substitute God with their own reason, on which they hope. In the end, both are alike. The sober view of things is something in between: ‘here God may help us; here, perhaps, our forces will be enough; and here everything is uncertain and left to the unknown and freedom’… Pessimists and optimists are equally prone to building systems, but never people of average outlook.

[5] And I even guess, as far as one can guess about it, who the real daemons are on the other side of the world. They are those who have already thirsted excessively here and can never get enough of pleasure; they continue to thirst there, and it is we who quench their thirst. A vortex that sucks in pleasures, from the innocent to the ugliest — that is what a daemonic man or spirit is. He is not enough, and he is convinced that for the sake of quenching his thirst, he is allowed everything…

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