Nikolay Rainov:MYSTICISM AND LACK OF FAITH
Group photo of the contributors to "Zlatorog" magazine, 1925-1927. Nikolay Rainov is the last one on the right, second row.
Source: Republic of Bulgaria, "Archives" State agency. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24635987
*The following is a speech by writer Nikolay Rainov, held at an event of the Bulgarian Theosophical society
Sofia, Bulgaria, June 1919.*
If we look at the modern man's attitude to eternal questions, we will note that there are two kinds of people. One may be called a mystic and the other a non-believer. There is a third kind: the prudent "golden mean," the legion of nameless people who come out in droves from the bottom of life, under one banner or another, adapting themselves, repeating indecisively other people's words, but not really caring at all about the great questions. They are an unhappy mixture of characterlessness, cowardice, mediocrity, and ignorance; at first they are afraid to take up a view or to oppose it, but as soon as they find profit in it they do so. They are, in general, indolent; they do not take the trouble even to think about a question, let alone to study it. In those fields which are considered to be the pride of human creative endeavor, these people enter with impudence and make of art a lucrative trade. For fear of being considered as impersonal and simple-minded, they take this side or that, but they would never sacrifice an asp or an hour of their time for the triumph of an ideal. They chase either gain, or fame, or power: always personal gain, always the good of the rugged individual who gives no broken steam to others. People of this kind are most numerous; strictly speaking, any one of them might be classed with the mystics or the infidels, though he would not typically exhibit the traits of this kind.
These two types are important and interesting for us. If we get to know them, we will get to know ourselves. Who is faithless? Who is a mystic? Where shall we look for them? How shall we find them? Thank God, we have no reason to go outside the clouds. The infidel is here. The mystic is here too. Every one of us is either a mystic or a faithless one, unless, of course, he belongs to the third group. It is enough to define the inner marks that distinguish the one from the other.
As we can see, in this division I compare the contrast between two extreme types. I do not speak of the believer, but of the mystic, that is, of the man who seeks to realize that which is the object of his faith, to merge himself in that in which he believes, to resemble his living or imaginary ideal, to become one with that which he esteems as highest. Nor have I a word for the sceptic, for him who doubts, yet does not deny the possibility of truth, who does not affirm, but yet investigates, searches, examines; no: I speak of the faithless man who does not allow truth to exist outside the pathetic circle of his admitted propositions. However extreme this characterization may be, it seems to me that any of us would still fall under it - if not perfectly, at least somewhat. There comes a moment - and some of us fall into mental blindness, into gloomy despair, or into prideful obstinacy, and say, "There is no truth, no God, no spirit, no immortality; outside the material world - all is deception." In others, on the other hand, there gushes forth the bright impulse to build something that would secure the good of others, even if it injured their own; or there glimmers in their soul the radiant ghost of some distant future, when all shall love one another, when there shall be no evil, no trouble, no violence; or they suddenly feel that all around us, is appropriate and significant, that invisible hands support the worlds in the starry sky, as a mother supports her nursing child.
None of us is a typical mystic or a non-believer, but everyone will have some of the characteristics of either type. At these two poles stand those who create modern reality, and on the web woven by the wires they hold we, the lesser people, move, pulling ourselves now towards one pole or another. We - those in the network - may not seem to be decisive but let us remember that those at the poles cannot do without us, and that the triumph of one or the other depends on our participation.
Let us look at those at the poles. What do they want? What do they think? What are they doing? Where are they calling us to? What are they tempting us with? What paradises do they promise us?
The infidel is by aspiration a destroyer and the mystic a creator. If mysticism has hitherto been badly understood, it is due to the faithless one, who has always forced his opinion of it upon men - and the human herd, conscious of its ignorance, has claimed after him a submissive "amen." However, it is time to deal with the dictionary. What is a mystic? What is a faithless one? A mystic is not a delusional man who stares at the stars all night and looks at the clouds by day; he is not a dullard who repeats a sentence or watches his navel until his mind grows dull; he is not a credulous man who sees in everything a prophecy, a foreshadowing, or a divine counsel: there are such people, but I have no word for them. Neither is he faithless who says, "There is nothing in this world; even I myself either exist or not." That man is mad. Religion can be defined as a path along which the human soul seeks God; and mysticism is that path, that more direct and steeper ascent, along which man finds God.
The mystic sees in the world's manifestations and in the beings inhabiting the universe a spiritual support, a spiritual origin. And the faithless one recognizes only what the five senses give him as something positive; he denies the existence of a spiritual origin, because he who says "spirit" says "immortality," and the faithless one does not recognize immortality; he is afraid of it, he spares the personal beginning in himself, he loves it; and when he hears that immortality is a kind of fusion with the unconditioned beginning, with God, he trembles for fear of losing his personal shell; like Herod in Wilde's drama, he says: " I do not allow the dead to be raised". For him there is no God: he wishes to be a god himself, to be worshipped, to be revered, to legislate, to judge, to be the highest to which human longing could fly. He identifies himself sometimes with reason, sometimes with science, but always with truth: outside of him there is no truth, no reality.
This is what he claims: "There is only one thing: that thing is me; there is only one truth: that which I acknowledge, everything else is superstition and foolishness." He is fond of these words - "superstition" and "folly" - and with them he is always measuring his enemy, the mystic: God is folly, the immortality of the soul is superstition, the spiritual is a lie, an invention of a sick mind, the work of a cowardly will. He is not, however, mentally honest: he does not believe in God, because God was a hijacked concept, but he believes in what he calls "common sense", as if reason was not a hijacked concept as well: he does not believe in the immortality of the soul, but in the immortality of energy (something no one can see), he believes and claims that power is not subject to destruction. He also loves the word prejudice, and usually judges by prejudice alone. When it comes to the transmigration of souls, he vaguely imagines that the human soul enters now and then into the worm, now and then into the mule, the cow, or the wolf. Apparently, he does not care to understand the doctrine of reincarnation by its original sources, but judges of it by the belief of savages. Those who share the belief that man is reincarnated in order to become more and more perfect from life to life do not maintain that the human soul passes into animals. Just so is the thought of Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Origen, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Leibniz, Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, and many others.
The mystic seeks to create, not to destroy. He believes in the noble, in the good in man; he looks for the valuable, the positive in every human manifestation. The infidel, on the contrary, is inclined to ridicule man, to revile him, to see in him the bad, the base, the negative. Hence begins his destructive work: he strives to undermine all that is positive in man, to obscure all that is bright in him, to take away all hope from him, to drag him away into his dark kingdom, to disbelieve him, moreover, to make him ill. To all the lofty designs which aim to raise man to a radiant future, and to all the movements which strive with unselfishness to extract man from the degrading care of temporal comforts, to free him from the ignominious bondage to the idol of gold, personal supremacy, or material good, the infidel opposes his insolent reproach.
Nicholas Roerich, the greatest of modern Russian artists, an inspired poet, became a theosophist. For the infidel, who until yesterday praised Roerich's paintings depicting the Stone Age, this artist suddenly became a mediocrity. He has read Thomas Mann and Maurice Maeterlinck with admiration, but as soon as he hears that one is holding discourses on Occultism, and the other is writing books on the same subjects - "Paths Down the Mountain," "Death," "The Great Secret," etc. - these writers appear to him mad, superstitious, almost deceivers. That is why he hates Edgar Poe, Gustav Meyrinck, Andre Gide, Heinie Evers, Tagore, Strindberg, Edward Schuré, Balmont and Merezhkovsky: they do not hide their belief in the secret, in the spiritual, in the immortal origin of life, whose manifestation is the manifold view of the universe. That there are, indeed, superstitious people, that there are simple people also among the admirers of mysticism, this is no lie; but the infidel deliberately equates with them the spiritual giants of the ages in order to ridicule them. In this calumny slumbers for him the hope that he will pass before cowardly listeners for a smarter man, than the leaders of the human spirit.
When he argues or makes disparaging remarks, the faithless man dresses himself in the ceremonial garb of some false aristocracy: he is proud to stand above "superstition," above "sectarianism." In fact, it is not difficult to see that he himself has his own false idols and a favourite sect: he shares a materialistic hypothesis, he belongs usually to a party, he seeks to take his place in the name of a programme - a programme much more sectarian than that of his enemies.
Someone puts the word before him that in time universal brotherhood among men will be a fact and that the nations await the advent of a great Mind which will unite the religious people of the whole world and break down the barriers between the different creeds. The infidel smiles contemptuously, "I am tired of all this grandmother talk about the second coming and archangel trumpets. All these superstitions of the Adventists... say something more serious or shut your mouth." His mental laziness does not allow him to study the matter, so that he can see that the claim of the Theosophists - let us say - differs from that of the Adventists both in grounds, in conception, and even in subject matter. For him theosophy, occultism, dunovism, folk prophets, angel trumpets, Adventism and spiritualism - are all the same: a kind of murky mystical fog, a kind of "animism", from which superstition lays bare its head. But he himself, from this point of view, has the same favourite superstitions. He cannot, of course, believe that a new religious Master will come, nor that there will be universal human brotherhood, but surely some genius economist will come and bring material equality between producers and purchasers. In the triumph of the idea of fraternity, in the name of the spiritual essence identical in all men, he does not believe; but in the triumph of the favourite scientific or political dogma - he believes, of course.
It is not a few who stand at that pole; on the contrary, the majority is there. There is Stavrogin, there is Sandeep Babu, there is Ivan Karamazov; there are those who deny the spiritual and laugh at what was faith for the princes of human progress: for Dostoevsky, for Tolstoy, for Shakespeare, for Goethe, for Christ, for Krishna, for Leonardo da Vinci, for Beethoven, for Lao Tzu. But I am not talking about literary types, about fictional people, but about living actors in all fields of culture and practical life. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of such faithless men; they are still today authoritative connoisseurs and revered workers in science, in literature, in art, in politics, and in educational work; moreover: their leaven has permeated the church, that is, even those societies which are considered the fruit of a spiritualistic outlook. Let us look at one or two of these varieties. One of the greatest scholars, Sir Oliver Lodge, a member of the Royal Society of England, who had long been concerned with spiritualistic phenomena, gave us after the war a book entitled “Raymond; or, Life and Death”. In it the old man sets forth with impartiality, and after a thorough examination of facts and conditions, his intercourse with Raymond, his son, who was killed as an officer in the war. The book proves beyond dispute the reality of a personal afterlife.
As might have been expected, the faithless scientists tried to dispute what was said: and, failing, hurled abuse at the writer.
This is the old way: if anyone speaks out on these dangerous questions, they bar interest in his research by saying that he was not a doctor, had no scientific title. If he was a doctor and a member of scientific societies, he was not a specialist. If he also happened to be a specialist, he was still young, he could not be trusted. With Sir Oliver Lodge, of course, who fulfilled all these conditions, and was old, they did otherwise: just because he was old, it was naïve to believe him, old people are usually infantile... In this case, the professor was also blamed for being a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and a theosophist.
And here's another interesting variety. It is about the common religious and moral principles that underlie all religions (the comparative history of religions recognizes this commonality). A priest stands up and says that Islam was a very inferior religion because it promised its faithful a paradise of houris, pilafs and sherbets... This priest, apparently, has neither opened the Quran nor asked himself if there is anything written on it. Otherwise, he would have known that the Quran does not include texts of pilaf and sherbets as the reward for a righteous life, and that the "houris" are meant to be the embodiments of good thoughts and deeds that will surround the faithful like angels in his afterlife. But the priest is unwilling to allow such an interpretation. When you object to him that Jesus says that he who does not eat from his flesh, or drink of his blood, shall not enter the kingdom of heaven, he will observe to you that Christ implied the sacrament of communion; in Christianity, therefore, an illocutionary crowding of the sacred books is admissible, but not in other religions. Fanaticism - another form of faithlessness - insists that only those whose ossified minds accept given dogmas will be saved: all others, being children of God, are doomed to perdition. Fanaticism is born of blind selfishness; it is the brother of faithlessness, because it turns spiritual truth into a dogmatic formula and so drives away from the field of religion the efforts of those who want not only to believe but to know. Such people are also stigmatized: they are called heretics, schismatics, they are excommunicated from the Church; as you see, in this case also the means, the means of struggle are the blasphemies, the means of faithlessness. Chauvinism is a third kind of blind selfishness, manifested in politics. All endeavours to incite hatred in men, to pit the representatives of one faith, nation, tribe, or race against the representatives of another human group, are all born of faithlessness, which denies the most important truth, that in all men dwells the same spiritual nature, that we are identical in nature, that we are members of the same great family. Herein lies the destructive work of this aspiration: it divides men, sets them against one another, sets class against class, people against people, foments riots, wars, mutinies, and exalts violence as the only means of solving the great questions of life.
But there are people at the other pole too. There stand the defenders of humanity, the enemies of vengeance and violence, those great hearts that know only love. Are they not creators not only of art but of philosophy, creators of religious systems and leaders of cultural epochs, have they not spoken to a man of God, of human destiny, of the immortality of the spirit in man and of the unity of that man with the world? Have they not affirmed that the personality is a spark of the divine Flame that gave birth to the worlds, that man is not born alone, that the Eye of fatherly love watches over him and a strong loving Hand guides him? Such is the view of the mystic even today. He feels that he is the brother of all, for in all men this divine life, as yet unconscious of itself, is bubbling up; all are outbursts of the same divine nature. And Vladimir Solovyov, and Juliusz Slowacki, and Eugène Carriere, and Walt Whitman, and Rabindranath Tagore, together with those who are the summits of man's supreme progress, affirm this. It is not important whether the atom, or energy, is immortal. What is important is that substance, force, life and consciousness are distinct states of divine activity, distinct manifestations of the divine nature which shows itself to us in this or that of its own kind: either as substance and force, or as life, or - at last - as consciousness. God dwells in all, the mystic claims, but not all are yet conscious of God in themselves. That is why the mystic's striving has always been directed towards the knowledge of God through the expansion of spiritual consciousness; God himself helps man in this work: troubles and sorrows, success and joy, tribulations and dangers are ways in which the divine spark in man forces itself to shine, to manifest itself, to show itself to consciousness, to become visible, to be known. A comparison used more than once by the mystics is appropriate here:
just as in marble there is a confined angel, whom the sculptor strives to unlock by freeing it from superfluous layers with the chisel and hammer, so in man dwells God, whom he must free for conscious life by removing that which suffocates Him.
Indeed, this work is difficult, it demands time, it demands centuries, it demands repeated efforts. Therefore, the doctrine of rebirth seems to the mystic an inevitable logical consequence of the fact that there is development and gradual perfection. In order for his spiritual experience to be comprehensive and abundant, man is born through a series of existences in different places, under different conditions, a son of these people, of one religion, then of another, a member of one social stratum, then of another. But this is not arbitrary. It is not imposed by some unjust punitive will. On the contrary, man himself is the mason of his own destiny. If in a past life he aspired to something good in this one he is born under good conditions, and the past experience is now crystallized into clearly defined gifts and abilities. And behold - the mystic derives the short wisdom: “Sow a thought and you will reap a habit”; sow a habit and you will reap a temper; sow a temper and you will reap a destiny'. In a word, "you reap what you sow": the ancient proverb of all nations, as true as it is old. Before the mystic's eyes the world appears as a revelation of God's design, an expression of His care for man. The history of mankind reveals man's long journey towards God. But God does not forsake his son; he sends him guides, prophets, messengers: such are the religious teachers, the philosophers, the brilliant scientists, the artists, the poets, the writers, the great statesmen.
Such is the view of the mystic. He rejoices in all that is bright in man, and encourages him; for what is dark, on the contrary, he grieves; but he never despises anyone, not even the criminal, whom he pities from his heart, because he is pained for him as for a wretched erring brother, deceived by infernal powers; he suffers with him, he blames himself for not having seen the wound of his heart in time to heal it. He is not a pessimist. He does not predict doom for mankind, but a bright future. When he reads a book, when he listens to conversation or music, when he beams at a picture or a spectacle, he is all in an expectant mood; he waits to gain something new and good, his heart and mind open to the positive, he follows the thoughts, images, or sounds with sympathy, as if he were sitting alone with it. He does not meet with warning and hostility the new book, the new conviction, the new picture; no: he knows how to blend in with others, to identify with them, so everything arouses his curiosity and brings him something new and important. He is not known to those who consider him a solitary and solitary contemplative. Madame Annie Besant, whose personality is the model of the practical mystic, is as much a thinker as a public figure. She admits that she is a socialist, belongs to the Labour Party of England, and travels the world to speak on various subjects: on religion, occultism, theosophy, sociology, education, literature, and philosophy. The true mystic is active; he is excited by everything: by the bright purpose of life, by pictures and music, by the sun, by flowers and trees, by public life, by work for others, by poetry and simple amusements. But his enthusiasm is not noisy, his rapture is quiet and deep, lasting; his temper is warm and lively, he does not repel like the faithless; the mystic does not like to argue, for argument destroys, he lets you think as you will without forcing his view upon you. He is positive. He readily affirms, rarely and powerfully denies; he prefers to say "yes" when the eternal cruel "no" is on the lips of the infidel. Many find him attractive; this is no wonder, for he who can forget himself in given conditions can be sure of becoming unforgettable to others. And it is a characteristic of the mystic that he forgets himself, that he lives for others, that he feels and experiences with them. In him you will not see the posture of a false aristocrat: on the contrary, he is simple, natural, and manifests himself sincerely and immediately; hence in his deeds and words there is a real identity which is grumbling to many. Without condemning man, he tells him the truth to his face without fear.
The mystic also presents some varieties. And it is not always as strictly and completely delineated as I have portrayed it to you. But this is not important: what is important is his positive creativity, his renewing participation in life. The mystic is that humble artist who loves his art purely and unselfishly - and strives to give people the best of which he is capable. The mystic is also the scientist to whom science is dear, as a path to an unconditional truth, that industrious worker who buries his years and his best efforts to discover the past of his people, or to make available to them those inventions of science which will give them a fresher and more conscious life. A mystic is also that thinker, public man, writer, industrialist, or economist who neglects personal gain and other people's opinions to lead his tribe in safe paths to a peaceful and happy future. In a word, a mystic is one who is guided in his activity by the aspiration - to manifest the spiritual element in man, God, to make that man live with the consciousness that eternity is his destiny.
As you can see, these two types do not lie somewhere far from us. The one prefers the truth and the good of others, the other prefers himself; the first longs to merge with God, the second thinks twenty-four hours only of one thing - to be well, to subdue others, to impose himself on them, to make them slaves of his will and authority. They were not born yesterday; they will not die tomorrow. Their history is long. Our people know them from the past. Were not Theodosius of Tarnovo, Patriarch Evtimiy, Father Paisii Hilendarski, St. Clement, Prlicheff, Tsar Samuil, Tsar Peter, Chernorizets Hrabar, John Exarch and many around them true mystics? Were not St. John Rilski and his three contemporary mystics all hermits and spiritual knights? What was the guiding thought of these selfless workers whose work was the golden fruit of boundless love? Their first was, to make of our nation "God's vineyard and God's garden," to water and dig the soil out of which fruitful divine branches would spring. Such "workers of God" were the Bogomils, representing the strongest mystical movement born on our earth.
There has always been a struggle between the mystic and the infidel. Today it is particularly strong. A decisive hour seems to be approaching, fatal to one of the two sides. There, at the poles, strange cries are heard, which man is not accustomed of hearing. One says, "We have come - millions of godless men, heathens, and atheists, beating our foreheads against the rusty iron, into the field - all to pray deeply to the Lord. Come forth - not from the starry, tender bed, God of iron, God of fire - not God of Mars, Neptune or Vega, in the vastness far away: come forth among us alone, appear, come down God of flesh, Man-God. In thy name shall we rise to battle - in thunder, in smoke shall we fly! We shall be in your power; we shall be in your power! It is time to lift up our chest in battle! The bullets rattle! Fight the uncourageous rabble! Thunder a parabellum at anyone who flees!” (Vladimir Mayakovsky; from the poem "150, 000, 000"). And at the other pole is a prayerful voice: "Life of my life, I will strive always to keep my body pure, for I know that on each of my members rests Your living touch. I will strive always to guard my thoughts from falsehood, for I know that You are that truth which awakens the light of reason in my soul. I will strive always to cast out all evil from my heart so that love may blossom there, for I know that its dwelling place is in the secret altar of my heart. And it will be my endeavour to reveal Thee to men in my deeds, for I know that Thy power gives me strength to act" (Rabindranath Tagore: “Gitanjali”). You hear them: one calls out some "god of flesh," a god in human form, and calls the people to rise up in battle in his name, to drink blood, to eat flesh, to kill whom they see. The other, on the contrary, makes a vow for the sake of the human race and his love for it - to keep his thoughts and impulses pure, to cast out all evil from his heart, and that his deeds shall be a revelation of God to men.
Whom do these two voices call on? They call on us – us, who are in the net. They want our will, our heart, our participation in the struggle. Whose side shall we take? Or do we waver in indecision - along with the human herd? Victory depends on our participation, so we will be responsible for our intervention. And, while some of us consider where to go, golden and seductive promises are heard from one pole. Someone's generous voice says, "I will give you the whole world, and the kingdoms of this world, and the power over it, and its treasures, just fall down and worship me!" Don't you think you have heard that voice other times? Did it not sound two thousand years ago from the top of a high mountain? Were not all the treasures of the Son of God vowed, even then, to cast down the cross and kiss the black right hand of the fallen angel?
The struggle between the infidel and the mystic seems fierce; they dispute all mankind, they dispute the future of the earth, they dispute the power of the universe. Yet their weapons are the same. One chooses no means: scorn, ridicule, slander, the knife, pyroxylin, asphyxiating gas, bribery, deceit, intimidation - all are good as long as they lead to the goal. And the other has made a sacred vow before God not to use violence, lies, or murder. Apparently, superhuman powers are needed to hold on to victory.
And more than once during the nervous struggle, one hears Someone's voice - asking meekly, with sorrowful compassion, "Where is your brother?" And the inquirer answers, bending his eyes stubbornly to the ground, "I don't know him. Am I my brother's keeper?" And this voice is familiar to you. When brother and brother fight, the name of one of them is always Cain...
Now is not the time for confession, but it is appropriate for each of us to ask ourselves, "Will I remain idle? Will not life itself force me to take sides in this glamorous struggle? Which side shall I take then?". These times are extraordinary. Rarely have darkness and light clashed so decisively. Astute minds elsewhere have already foreseen this. In India, Dr. Annie Besant, President of the Theosophical Society, and Rabindranath Tagore, leader of the Brahmo Samaj Society, shook hands to work together. In Europe, all spiritualists are coming together to act with friendly forces. Last September, at a conference, spiritualists from all over the world met in Brussels, in which took part - among the many I shall name only a few - Prof. Lenot of Paris, Prof. Jean Delille of Brussels, Prof. Cornelius from Frankfurt am Main, prof. Fournier of Nice, Zinaida Hippius (the famous Russian poet), Dmitry Merezhkovsky (the well-known Russian poet), Louis Gastine (the eminent thinker) of Paris, the poet Edouard Schuré, the Princess Hohenlohe, Count Prozor (Ibsen's translator, diplomat, writer), Countess Prozor (the eminent fiction writer), and others. These men - poets, public men, writers, scientists and thinkers - representing the progressive thought of our time, have judged that materialism in all its forms is today the greatest danger to the common human cultural development. They proclaimed spiritualism as their creed - not only philosophical but political. Because they found that the Society of Nations was guided in its activities by the desire to stir up economic rivalries between known nations, they declared that it could not be the vehicle of international conscience because it was organized by materialists, and they declared themselves against it. The participants in the conference vowed to fight materialism - in all ways permitted to honest men, and to encourage those organizations which pursue an idealistic goal.
After the storms we have been experiencing for years, it has become clear to us Bulgarians that the first need is to bring about a change in consciousness, a change in man's outlook. The danger of materialism, of faithlessness, shone through: this conviction trumpeted that being determines consciousness; and its advocates tried to change this being, to bring about by violence a correction in conditions, so the minds working under these new conditions might also be changed. Apparently, the effect was taken for the cause. It was claimed that the mind was a function of the brain, that what was called by some the soul was the sum of various bodily manifestations. It must not be forgotten that these views have still many protectors in this country: in science, in the schools, in politics, and in literature. After the war a peculiar kind of poetry appeared: most of its representatives were inspired by the exuberant revolutionary vitiations of Russia and Germany. This crude poetry, full of declamations, where God and humanity and affection are blasphemed, bore its fruit: a number of unrestrained collections of verse and narrative, which set our artistic language back fifty years. Attempts were also made to bring Cubism and Futurism (the last rejects of materialism in this field) into the fine arts, but here the success was even weaker.
A much stronger stronghold of faithlessness in our country is science. Not all our scientists are materialists, of course. But some fully justify the characterization of the faithless that I threw before you a moment ago. One of them, who recognizes the authority of Ernst Haeckel, Einstein, and Freud, ("our great teacher Freud"), rails against "philosophical idealism, especially that of a theosophical character," because it had introduced "great confusion into the understanding of the problem of religion." In the teachings of Mr. Peter Dunov and Mr. Sophrony Nikov (he calls both of them "animists"), this procession of religion from a psychoanalytical point of view shows signs of "individual-psychic regression", i.e. a return to "social-psychological systems and forms of thinking that have outlived their time". He does not like Prof. William James, though he recognizes in his person "the most authoritative and profound philosopher of recent times in Western Europe and America, a very sincere religious philosopher and theosophist"; and he dislikes him because this wise thinker sees in religion "the supreme consolation and support for every suffering heart."
The wisest men of the Slavonic tribe are not overlooked - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Vladimir Solovyov. For the thought in their ideologies is the notion that "without faith in God there is no happiness, nor is perfection possible in human life, that as soon as man loses God in his soul, he loses morality - and becomes a cold selfish man and a terrible criminal of the type of Smerdyakov, Iv. Karamazov, Stavrogin, Peter Verhovensky". This scholar sees in the views of the mentioned writers the fruits of a late tribe, still very far from the "real, objective understanding of the world"; he concludes, therefore, that in the Slavs, in general, there were still very few "elements of real analytical psychology", that these peoples were still close in consciousness to the Middle Ages.... But indeed, the ideological substitutes of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Solovyov already consider belief in God and the need for morality to be outlived lies: they are building the life of today's Russia on some plan unknown even to Western Europe; obviously, we would have to consider the Bolshevik leaders to be extremely advanced, surpassing even the cultural level of Western European nations, since the "real and objective understanding of the world" is exemplarily put into practice in the life of Soviet Russia. Has this made Russia more honorable? And, if this high-cultural conception of the world is so dear to him, why did this gentleman - I omit his name - not leave our university and return to Ekaterinoslav? He predicts the death of religion; he claims that the concept of God would disappear in the human psyche. "I may," he said, "be well conscious of myself in rational terms, e.g. as a fleeting part of the eternal energy, but that is no longer religion." Why? Because the "sensuous element" no longer participated in this consciousness. In fact, he himself had not altogether banished that element from his consciousness as a scientist, for he admitted that he believed in Einstein's energy theory, which was already pulling back the curtain on the bottomless unknowable reality or force (of which Spencer spoke) - and the twentieth century would "probably" "solve that problem completely." He believed in a "unity, or unified origin in being, understanding it as an eternal energy" that existed in the universe; this origin was reflected "in all natural phenomena as well as in our psyche"; he called it the origin and mover of all phenomena in the universe." It goes without saying that such an abducted "beginning" is unknowable by experience: it can only be accepted as a logical necessity, it can - therefore - only be believed in.
Faith is ineradicable from the human heart, it is inherent in everyone - that is why we find it in the faithless. Whether one will believe in God and providence, or in Spencer's "unconditioned reality", or finally - in Einstein's "one beginning", is not important. No matter how hard the realists try to wrest faith from the soul of man, their efforts will remain fruitless. Faith is unquenchable. Nations cannot live and individuals cannot create without an ideal.
And what is an ideal? The highest point of human aspiration, the zenith of longing towards which the efforts of the individual and those of the collective are directed. The ideal always contains something transcending human achievement at a given time; it harbours something beyond the powers of man, something superhuman, something divine. Every ideal is another step towards God. Is today's Russia happy? There are no ideals there beyond human attainment. Religion has been replaced by political economy. The common human good is conceived as an extension of the Bolshevik system until it embraces the whole world. Is this an ideal worthy of man? Do we not also see the bloody footsteps of this ideal on our poor, wronged, but still good country? Are the efforts of the scientists infidels pointing us towards that ideal? If this ideal is dear to them, let them follow it themselves? And let us, simpler than they, be allowed to believe, as our fathers, mothers, and grandfathers believed, in the good God and in his care for men. If the great electric lamp, with its dazzling light, is meant to illuminate a cold world on which Self-love and Violence run rampant, we will not have this cultural invention. We shall be more honoured under the gentle light of the wax lamp with which our mothers brightened in the days of our childhood the white room, from whose corner a wooden icon smiled warmly.