Читать книгу The Woods - Vladimir Bibikhin - Страница 11

We touched last time on the topic of the law and, without naming it, unceasing prayer. This is the central theme of The Candid Tales of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father, or The Way of a Pilgrim.¹ Among the collection of literature on asceticism of Hieroschemamonk Feodosiy of Karulia and of his disciple and novice Nikodim was a book titled simply The Pilgrim. Feodosiy was an elder living on the almost sheer cliffs in the south of Mount Athos and died on 2 October 1937. By the early 1980s, Nikodim was himself an extremely aged elder.

It is important for us to understand that prayer must be unceasing and synchronized with breathing and the beating of the heart. Unceasing prayer is considered to be not an act of human beings but a condition of grace. Nobody could stop the bleeding of the woman who had an issue of blood. The wandering of our thoughts, their flow and dissipation cannot be stopped by thought alone. They wander, and in the course of their wandering the desire arises to staunch the flow, but this desire itself is part of their straying. The woman’s bleeding was stopped by the grace of God. What part must be played by the individual? It is essential that we should have faith: we must believe that the straying of our thoughts can be stopped. Today we shall need also to talk about what faith is. Faith means that a person must sincerely do their utmost to pray continually if its grace is to descend. There is a paradox here: I am doing my utmost to attain something I know is beyond my strength, but if I give up and tell myself it is all right to rest, the gift will not be given.

Again, there can be no question of progressing through the stages of spiritual life by experience. On the contrary, if it was a matter of experiencing ascetic practice, the so-called artistic praying of adepts, the τέχνη τɛχνῶν, to use a very old expression of asceticism, that would make it impossible to talk about it. There would have to be some quite different way of passing it on. We are going to stay on the level of phenomenology and, in Wittgenstein’s sense, of grammar. The task we are setting ourselves is not to learn how to do and practise something clever; our focus is on understanding how constant, unceasing prayer is profoundly relevant to all of us here and now, and how it is present in what we are saying. In other words, we are focusing our attention on something that is already here, right now. We are focusing strictly and solely on that. The extent to which that should be our mission is also part of today’s topic because we cannot focus our attention on everything.

What we imagine we need to do is not necessarily what we genuinely must do. An error frequently encountered in theological writing is describing something as a matter for the believer: in other words, not for everybody because not everybody goes to church. To some extent, perhaps to a large extent, and we will need to decide for ourselves how large, these matters may be of importance for everybody.

By failing to distinguish between what is common to everybody and what is of relevance only to those within the faith community, theologians do immense damage. They professionalize what is common to all humanity, ‘relieving’ ordinary people of work that needs to be done, ‘relieving’ them of the Cross that is theirs by right, as if spiritual matters were the concern only of us, the church-goers and, more particularly, of the people who write books about theology. You can, however, oppress someone not only by imposing an unsupportable burden on them, but also by depriving them of a task, and the theologians who declare that sort of lockout are trying to deprive the large numbers of people who do not go to church of the employment that is of the greatest importance for a human being. That is one kind of harm. The other is the opposite: ‘For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders’ (Matthew, 23: 4). The harm comes not from placing burdens on people’s shoulders, since, as we read in Matthew, 11: 29, Christ himself is a yoke and a burden, but from the fact that the Pharisees tie the burden to be borne in the wrong way, perhaps even deliberately, with the intention of making it uncomfortable, δɛσμɛύουσι (δɛσμός, binding and shackles): they bind it so as to fetter a person. Whereas the church should be a place of divine freedom, they make it a prison. It will be our job to unpick the granny knots they tie.

We read the theologian’s instructions.

Before the commencement of prayer, arrange yourself reverently in the presence of God until you are conscious of his nearness, and kindle in your heart a living faith that God sees and is ready to hear you.

Make yourself mindful of who God is and who you are. He is the Creator, the lord and master of all. He is the One who holds in His hand your life on earth and in the hereafter. He is your Maker and, although you were created in His image, because of the Fall you languish in inner darkness and spiritual blindness. As one blind from birth, you pray to Him continually to give you sight, and thus you stand in ever growing godly fear before Him, filled with the pain of self-knowledge.²

Well, what is wrong with that? It is all true. Not a granny knot to be seen. Only, to whom is this being said? To a believer prior to prayer? Why not to me here and now? Is self-knowledge not my own task right now? I am not praying, not in church. Does that mean I don’t need to bother with it at present? Has my obligation, which I should have assumed long ago, been taken from me and dumped on someone else, or on some other me, not the one who is here but one who is somewhere else?

There is a confusion surrounding the issue of unceasing prayer. There is a confusing of the focusing of the mind – which is the task and most important job of every human being, and is indeed what makes us human, something which is the continual obligation of all of us – and a highly specialized monastic practice, both Christian and non-Christian (in the case, for example, of Tibetan monks). This practice is extremely difficult and unusual, and achieved, according to a monk with a great deal of experience of prayer, by only a very few, perhaps one in a thousand.

Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps I really ought to be somewhere else, but the duty of mindfulness is upon me at this moment, and on however many me’s there may be, and wherever I am. A cat goes out to a soft flower bed in the garden, does its business in a hole, and, using its two front paws alternately, it fills in the hole with loose soil, approaching it from different directions, then sniffs to make sure there is no longer any smell there. It brings its claws out a little further, adds a little more soil, again from different directions to ensure that the surface is level and that it has not formed another hole, then goes off reassured to lie down peacefully in the sun. It has done so not because it remembered that was the right thing to do, but because it is an automaton, in the sense in which Philo of Alexandria says that humans are incapable of creating an automaton; our present-day so-called robots are the exact opposite of real automata. The cat is in no danger of forgetting, because it does not need to remember; what you have never memorized you can never forget. It is the law without the need to remember it. Without going into what remembering and consciousness are, let us make one very plausible supposition, that the aim of the law, as indeed the overall goal, is not consciousness and remembering but salvation, redemption. The cat, when it has done everything in accordance with its own law, goes off a little smugly, with a sense of appropriateness and having done the right thing. If the situation were different, it might hastily skulk off. A question to check you are still awake: what has all this got to do with the forest? The cat is not, of course, in the forest, but domesticated animals are like the forest coming to visit us. In them the forest comes to us or into us. It comes very close.

Let us add here something to our understanding of the law. It faces us with the problem of our separation from grace. At first glance, we can see no difference: the law and grace are surely just the same thing; the law is part of grace. But, as Olga Sedakova notes, we find a complex, intertwined relationship between the law and grace in the writings of Hilarion, Metropolitan of Kiev in the mid-eleventh century.³ Grace is more lawful than the law, just as Sarah is the lawful wife of Abraham as opposed to Hagar. Grace, according to Hilarion, takes precedence over the law, just as Sarah was already Abraham’s wife before there was the law. The law is inspired by grace, just as Sarah, who for St Paul is the embodiment of grace, advised Abraham to have a child by her slave, Hagar. The law, we find, is wholly subsumed by grace, dictated by it and inconceivable without it. ‘First there was law and after there was grace,’ Hilarion says, speaking of time, but in reality the opposite is the case: grace came before there was law and only had to wait for the time to be right before it sent forth the apparition of itself, the law. ‘Grace said unto God, “If it be not yet the time to send me down to the earth to save the world, go Thou down to Mount Sinai and give the Law.’ That which casts a shadow, the law, must always rise previously since otherwise there would be nothing to cast the shadow. The law was sent down first by grace.

Let us adopt this inseparability of the law from grace from Metropolitan Hilarion, and thank Olga Sedakova for drawing our attention to it.⁴ If, however, this portent of salvation, the law, always lies over us, if the law is in essence grace and is innate in us, why do we not see it, and why do we claim that human nature is freedom? It is because the law is too integral to us, and because it operates of its own accord, as an automaton, we do not notice it because that faculty we could notice it with is being used for purposes other than those for which the faculty was designed.

Olga Sedakova, to whom we will find ourselves referring increasingly, responded to a questionnaire sent out by Lettres internationales. The magazine was planning to mark the year 2000 by holding a contest for the best philosophical essay, analogous to the one that launched the career of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1750.⁵ Sedakova responded to a request to suggest a title with, ‘What We Have Forgotten About Humans’.

We clearly have forgotten something. When the pilgrim in The Way of a Pilgrim discovers his other, self-moving self, the automaton within him, he exclaims, ‘Lord! What a mysterious thing man is!’⁶ Forgetting is not necessarily a bad thing. It would be insane always to remember everything. ‘How handsome you are, how intelligent, how healthy, how admirably you live your life, what a lot you know!’ All that is no doubt true, but it might be a good idea to forget it. Is forgetfulness ever a disgrace? It can be. It was disgraceful for Russia to forget that religion is, quite literally, the law; and to forget that 300 years ago the primary meaning of ‘the law’ was ‘faith’, ‘religion’. It would be different if human nature had changed in the intervening period, but it has not; it is still just the same. Attending to our salvation and redemption remains our law, fundamental, immediate and constantly at work within us, but that is something we have forgotten, and that is a disgrace.

If I have forgotten where I put the scissors and am looking for them, that is tiresome, even disgraceful; I am ashamed to be losing my marbles. If, however, I have forgotten that I owe someone money, I will not even be trying to acquire some. If the person who lent me the money is waiting, I really ought to go and see him. Better still, I should do the right thing, go and see him, ring his doorbell and tell him, very pleased with myself, that here I am and have brought the money I owe. But instead I have forgotten all about the debt, I am not where I should be, standing on my creditor’s doorstep with a self-satisfied smirk, but am somewhere else. To make matters worse, nobody else in the world knows I am in the wrong place. My creditor continues to trust (credere, to believe) all is well, and supposes that if I have not come to see him it is probably because I am getting the money, earning it perhaps, and conscientiously making arrangements to repay the debt.

Perhaps a person is not where he should be, not because he has yet to find his place in life, but because he has never thought to look for it. I need to remember a phone number but can’t, so I use a mnemonic technique, having taken Freud’s advice and tried free association of ideas. What technique can I use, though, if I have forgotten what it is that I have forgotten?

The expression for this in asceticism we have already mentioned: the technique of techniques, τἐχνη τɛχνῶν. Just as asceticism, as the theologians rightly remind us, is by no means the same as monasticism – there is asceticism for the family and asceticism has a long history in philosophy – so self-discovery is for everybody. ‘At the commencement of prayer, ask the Lord Jesus Christ for true self-discovery of your disastrous inner state, your spiritual poverty and complete inability to abide by your own efforts in virtue…. The path of self-perfection is a path of contrite self-discovery, awareness that you are blind, deaf, mute and naked.’⁷

This is so far common to all. Philosophy with its techniques does the same thing. We recall Wittgenstein’s warnings that we are incurably blind. ‘The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.’ ‘We are asleep. Our life is a dream, but we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.’ According to Plato, we are always just halves, symbols.

‘Concentration is as essential for true prayer as a lamp is for light. Train your mindfulness; it is prayer better than anything else that keeps track of it.’⁸ There is only one form of concentration, one form of mindfulness; if you have a church-going kind of concentration and a church-going attention span and they dissipate when you leave the church, you just need to pay more attention, until it ceases to squander itself on trying to distance itself from some other kind of mindfulness.

This is just a general guide to prayer, the commonplaces related to unceasing prayer. ‘In order to concentrate the mind on the content of prayer, you must bring it into your heart.’ Next, warmth. ‘The heart will immediately respond to this concentration with a subtle feeling that is the beginning of inner warmth.’⁹ There can, however, be the danger in warmth that it may prove to be sensual arousal.

The effort of concentrating is hard at first, but then it becomes the automatic self-movement of prayer. It addresses the automaton; it is the opposite of a mechanical response in which we are not participating, merely observing the automaton from outside, setting it going. On the contrary, we sink into the automaton.

On this path, there are many dangers: ‘any vice may possess a man’. The very description of them is terrifying: ‘the progeny of hell’; ‘a soul covered in wounds descends in unendurable sufferings to the depths of despair’.¹⁰ By now we may be wondering whether it was such a great idea to enter the dark forest, but this is an ordeal of purification, and those who pass through it are rewarded.

Let us turn to The Pilgrim. The Pilgrim (strannik) has revealed to him a strange person. We have called the divine wisdom and its automaton strange. In the landscape of strangeness, strangeness grows within Sophia, the divine wisdom. There is no other place where the cultural or spiritual or creative dimension is purified by the ideal processing and assimilating the material. Here there is no depressing experience of death, the death, say, of culture or education. Despair comes when we plan, when we hoped to do something good but as usual it did not turn out as we wished. ‘As usual’ is bad, and we wanted something better than ‘as usual’, something good. But let us ask why ‘as usual’ is bad and leaves us dissatisfied. It is precisely because our plans were for something different and things did not turn out in accordance with them. Our soul is anguished by the difference between how things are and how they should be. We see it only too clearly. There it is. We have work to do. We work on it.

In the landscape of The Pilgrim, there is nothing remotely resembling that gap. He is surrounded not by ‘dead matter’ (there is such an expression), but by the forest before it turns into matter. Metric space is absent, there are no signposts to guide us, and the only appropriate reaction is a combination of fear, mindfulness, and caution, ɛύλἀβɛια. The goal is not to fulfil a plan, which does not exist and could not be carried out in the forest, but the difference between the frightening, alien entrancement of the forest and his own, redemptive entrancement. The forest has within it a potential both for danger and for redemption. In the dark forest, the only possibility is to become lost and disappear, but we have a choice between different ways of becoming lost. Fleeing from the forest into what merely appears through lack of insight to be dead matter is not an escape from danger to redemption, but fleeing from choosing between them back into the realm of plans. In place of ɛύλἀβɛια, in place of the technique of techniques, the art of arts, there is only technology. Instead of engaging with the forest, we merely flee from it into the realm of artifice.

The opening of The Pilgrim reads:

By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast-pocket a Bible. And that is all.

On the 24th Sunday after Pentecost I went to church to say my prayers there during the Liturgy. The first Epistle of St Paul to the Thessalonians, and among other words I heard these – ‘Pray without ceasing.’ It was this text, more than any other, which forced itself upon my mind, and I began to think how it was possible to pray without ceasing. (15)

The commentator to the first Epistle to the Thessalonians, 5: 17, hastens to clarify that this means pray spiritually with ceasing. The Pilgrim is not up to dealing in such subtleties, thank God. Pray without ceasing means pray without ceasing. Full stop.

He treks through forests mainly, not as a spiritual being remote from the things of this world, but as a solitary human being. ‘Thus once more I set out on my lonely way…. It happened at times that for three days together I came upon no human dwelling, and in the uplifting of my spirit I felt as though I were alone on the earth’ (77–8). People want to help him and say, ‘Here is a nice fellow-traveller for you.’ ‘God be with you and with him too,’ said I, ‘but surely you know that it is never my way to travel with other people. I always wander about alone’ (86). Other people are constantly and powerfully present, but either as death, or murder, the abyss, stupefied by drunkenness, lust, malice, or, on the contrary, as charity, feeding him, loving him, discovering heaven and weeping with joy.

The guidelines of metric, calibrated space only confuse this man of the forest, who lives by the heart and breathing, not by the mind (if by that we understand something separate from the heart). His concern is so completely with the heart that he thinks no more about his mind than he does about bread: if there is none, there is none and it is time to die. If there is bread, that is a miracle. When deserting soldiers fall upon him in the forest, they decide there is no point talking to this incoherent wanderer and beat him senseless. When he regains consciousness, he is not in the least concerned about having been unconscious or the possibility of suffering from concussion: the brain is no more his than money, the body, or clothing. And accordingly his body, clothes, and mind serve him obediently and faultlessly.

The Pilgrim’s breathing is like thought, his inhaling and exhaling a cautious probing of the world. We are reminded, to anticipate, of one point in pre-Socratic philosophy where the cosmic mind is absorbed through breathing. We guess why, in Leonardo’s likening of the earth to a living creature, there is no mind, no consciousness, no brain: the breathing of the earth, the rising and falling of the tides, are how it senses the cosmos. Consciousness can add nothing to the way the earth absorbs the world into itself through this breathing, and might even detract from it: when a cautious, tentative probing of the world is taking place with every inhalation and exhalation, the whole world and all its wisdom, Sophia, is being sensed; not just one’s own, limited mind but all minds.

Are humans dissolved, lost, in the world? How can we put it? They absorb the world and are absorbed by it, but to the extent that they meekly withstand and endure their own emptiness, impoverished and receptive, they become so unique that they alone stand out (in their solipsism, we can say after reading Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger) from absolutely everything else.

There is here a curious contrast: total acceptance of everything and of any world, just as it is, no matter how it may conduct itself, obedience to it; indeed, dissolution, but that is because there is a power cast into the world that consists, as it were, of pure attentiveness, intent scrutiny. In the Pilgrim’s intellectual baggage, as in his knapsack, there is only bread, never anything more than his daily bread. Christianity is not a system of knowledge but a craving, an attraction, and to what we shall shortly see. What corresponds to this state of emptiness, this pure bafflement about how unceasing prayer can be possible (since a person ‘must practise other matters in order to support his life’), to this utter helplessness, is the very extremity of what he desires: divinity for his entire self, even when asleep: ‘The continuous interior Prayer of Jesus is a constant, uninterrupted calling upon the divine Name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart; while forming a mental picture of His constant presence, and imploring His grace, during every occupation, at all times, in all places, even during sleep’ (22). ‘I sleep, but my heart waketh.’ This is a huge demand, if you recall the tone of blissful happiness beyond measure with which these words are uttered in the Song of Solomon, 5: 2. This penniless wanderer is anticipating just such an encounter, in which everything will be fulfilled.

The Pilgrim succeeds in this. He begins with the unceasing prayer to Jesus, which at first he pronounces out loud, forcing himself: ‘… repeat only the following words constantly, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Compel yourself to do it always,’ he is told by a holy man (26). We can readily imagine that, pronouncing these words of the prayer 3,000 times, then 6,000, then 12,000 times a day, forcing himself at first, he would eventually learn to do so from habit and find it easier.

To begin with, this ceaseless saying of the Prayer at first brought a certain amount of weariness, my tongue felt numbed, I had a stiff sort of feeling in my jaws. I had a feeling at first pleasant but afterwards slightly painful in the roof of my mouth. The thumb of my left hand, with which I counted my beads, hurt a little. I felt a slight inflammation in the whole of that wrist, and even up to the elbow, which was not unpleasant. Moreover, all this aroused me, as it were, and urged me on to frequent saying of the Prayer. For five days I did my set number of 12,000 prayers, and as I formed the habit I found at the same time pleasure and satisfaction in it. (28)

But this was only like the starter motor turning over the engine. The serious business began when the engine started. This is not an inappropriate metaphor. Let us remember that the mover, movement of a mover by another mover, and prime mover are important philosophical terms. Like any metaphor, it takes us only so far before failing, and where it fails is where we encounter something that is impossible in mechanics. Perpetual motion is an impossibility and there cannot be a motionless prime mover. An automaton is a mechanical impossibility.

The praying which the Pilgrim learned is called self-moving, self-acting prayer. It came as a greater surprise than if he gained something: a new skill, for example. It was a different kind of enrichment from what he was looking for, and it was not something he acquired: he found himself. He discovered that this self-mover, this automaton, was something he had always been.

There is all the difference, all the interest (inter-esse), between what had become an agreeable habit, a mechanism, something that had become a settled pious practice after some initial compulsion involving skill, and what was vouchsafed the Pilgrim. His holy man, his starets, said,

Be thankful to God that this desire for the Prayer and this facility in it have been manifested in you. It is a natural consequence which follows constant effort and spiritual achievement. So a machine to the principal wheel of which one gives impetus works for a long while afterwards by itself…. You see what feelings can be produced even outside a state of grace in a soul which is sinful and with passions unsubdued. (29)

This is all mechanics, but it is quite different when ‘God is pleased to grant the gift of self-acting spiritual prayer’ (ibid.).

The receiving of this gift of self-activating or self-moving prayer was accompanied by good signs. ‘If I happened to meet anyone, all men without exception were as dear to me as if they had been my nearest relations…. My lonely hut seemed like a splendid palace’ (30). ‘Everybody was kind to me, it was as though everyone loved me’ (31). For the time being, there were only signs, as if the Pilgrim were being drawn almost against his will into a vortex, a whirlpool, and he found that strange.

I have become a sort of half-conscious person. I have no cares and no interests. The fussy business of the world I would not give a glance to. The one thing I wish for is to be alone, and all by myself to pray, to pray without ceasing; and doing this, I am filled with joy. God knows what is happening to me! (32)¹¹

A sense of danger, of dizziness, because one has been caught up by forces immeasurably greater than oneself. An auspicious craziness, and yet one is not even at the threshold, only on the far-off approaches. ‘Of course, all this is sensuous, or as my departed starets said, an artificial state which follows naturally upon routine’ (ibid.).

This is joy at the ending of blistered feet and weariness, the gliding along of human existence; it is the free soaring that is sometimes mistaken for the full measure of the freedom conferred upon the Pilgrim. This man has taken on a yoke; he is engrossed every minute in the issue of salvation or perdition, and that is already a change he will prefer to any other lot. He is, though, still unimaginably far away from what is to come.

‘In this blissful state I passed more than two months of the summer. For the most part I went through the forests and along by-roads’ (35). In the forest, though, there was nothing to eat, and he went hungry. In the dark forest, there can be robbers, and he was robbed. ‘When I came to I found myself lying in the forest by the roadside robbed. My knapsack had gone: all that was left of it were the cords from which it hung, which they had cut’ (35–6). But he thanks God. He needed this to calm him down, to ensure even further that he had no possessions of his own. You may ask, was that so as, in return, to gain something especially valuable? That is how we are used to thinking, but it seems it would be mistaken here. The truth is evidently that the Pilgrim needed to yield, to give up absolutely everything. But surely he must at least have something to hold on to, something to keep him alive? No, nothing; and if his life goes on, then this is purely through grace and, actually, by a miracle.

The experience of the Pilgrim is needed in order to show that humans can in fact not cling to anything. Perhaps only such a person can be granted unconditional liberation, and in his condition he received it not only for himself – he was half-crazy and unable to define and delimit himself – but, as it were, for himself and on behalf of all people. This was, perhaps, not yet total liberation, but a liberation it clearly was.

And when with all this in my mind I prayed with my heart, everything around me seemed delightful and marvellous: the trees [he is in the forest, his immediate environment is trees, Bibikhin], the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light, seemed to be telling me that they existed for man’s sake, that they witnessed to the love of God for man, and that all things prayed to God and sang His praise. [The trees spoke to him, Bibikhin.] Thus it was that I came to understand what the Philokalia calls ‘the knowledge of the speech of all creatures,’ and I saw the means by which converse could be held with God’s creatures. (45)

The forest becomes ever more dense around him until he eventually walks for three days without coming upon any village at all.

My supply of dried bread was used up, and I began to be very much cast down at the thought I might die of hunger. I began to pray my hardest in the depths of my heart. All my fears went, and I entrusted myself to the will of God. My peace of mind came back to me, and I was in good spirits again. (46)

In the very depths of the forest, he stayed and lived with a forester who had kept watch over it for ten years. The forester lived on bread and water and, moreover, wore penitential chains weighing over 30 kg next to his skin, and was, accordingly, practising his asceticism even more strongly than the Pilgrim. ‘I never swear, drink neither wine nor beer, I never quarrel with anyone at all, and I have had nothing to do with women and girls all my life’ (48–9).

But this is not the Way. ‘Unless you have God in your mind and the ceaseless Prayer of Jesus in your heart’, all will be in vain (50). The only way is to cleave to Christ in all his dear sweetness, warmth, and peace.

Here, in the very depths of the forest, the Pilgrim finally learned to trust himself and began looking for ‘ceaseless self-acting prayer in the heart’ (51). He found it, again accompanied by auspicious signs. ‘Sometimes my heart would feel as though it were bubbling with joy, such lightness, freedom and consolation were in it’ (55).

One note, though, about techniques of prayer: in stark contrast with the simplicity and naturalness of the ‘self-movement’ that the Pilgrim will come to, his techniques of twelve thousandfold repetition of a seven-word phrase, of sitting in a special posture while praying, of focusing his attention on the heart, are not just manifestly not ‘self-moving’ but are, as he himself admits, manifestly compulsive. They are methods applied specifically to the body and emotions, while what he is seeking is neither specific nor constrained. The Pilgrim’s transition from mechanical to self-acting prayer has a glaring and intentional paradox at its heart. We can find passages, not one but several, that manifestly illustrate this dichotomy or paradox, right there in the text of the Pilgrim. He is teaching a blind man, who already engages in unceasing prayer but has not yet discovered how ‘the mind finds the heart’ (114) (or what Feodosiy of Karula calls ‘the place in the heart’).¹²

[Y]ou can imagine with your mind and picture to yourself¹³ [note that imagine and picture! Bibikhin] what you have seen in time past, such as a man or some object or other, or one of your own limbs…. Then picture to yourself your heart in just the same way, turn your eyes to it just as if you were looking at it through your breast, and picture it as clearly as you can. And with your ears listen closely to its beating, beat by beat¹⁴ … with the first beat say or think ‘Lord,’ with the second, ‘Jesus.’ … Thus, as you draw your breath in, say, or imagine[!] yourself saying, ‘Lord Jesus Christ’, and as you breathe out again, ‘have mercy on me.’

That is on p. 115, and in the same paragraph he continues, ‘But then, whatever you do, be on your guard against imagination and any sort of visions. Don’t accept any of them whatever, for the holy Fathers lay down most strongly that inward prayer should be kept free from visions, lest one fall into temptation.’

Are we really to suppose that whoever wrote The Pilgrim failed to notice this lexical absurdity: ‘Picture! Imagine!’ ‘Guard against imaginings, pictures!’? Perhaps he did, but wrote it anyway, as if he had not noticed. The paradox is almost thrown in our face. Does that make the incongruity, which is unquestionably important and even crucial, only all the clearer and more splendid? Has anyone already decided?

Let me make it easier by giving two examples of ‘picturing’. During the course of these conversations, the Pilgrim and the blind man are wandering in the forests of Siberia (‘we were walking through a forest,’ 116). ‘Suddenly he said to me, “What a pity! The church is already on fire; there, the belfry has fallen.” “Stop this vain dreaming,” I said, “it is a temptation to you. You must put all such fancies aside at once.”’ It was exactly what the Fathers of the Church had denounced, was it not? A call to sober-mindedness, a warning against daydreams. The blind man meekly obeyed, fell silent, and continued his praying. When they had gone twelve versts, they entered the town and saw several burnt houses still smouldering and the collapsed belfry. The blind man had seen it just as it was falling.

The purpose of the interdiction of imagining and picturing is to liberate a different kind of imagining and picturing, to restore the vision of the seer. Does that mean those techniques of compulsion serve to liberate? What is liberated is nothing less than the prophetic, intelligent human being from the rot and the filth of coagulated putrefaction.

The human soul … can see even in the darkness, both what happens a long way off as well as things near at hand. Only we do not give force and scope to this spiritual power. We crush it beneath the yoke of our gross bodies, or with our haphazard thoughts and ideas. (116–17)

That ‘or’ is preceded by a comma, meaning that the yoke of our bodies includes the haphazardness of our thoughts. Let us recall the bonds in the Gospel according to St Matthew. The body becomes gross not when it is given freedom – of itself the body is wise – but when by perfidious bonds it is entangled by our thoughts. The Pilgrim’s whole purpose is to collect and preserve himself every minute, every second; in this way, the body returns to the body and the mind is returned to the mind. This important part of the text is marked out, unexpectedly and inconspicuously, by the fact that the language is transformed into good, classical Russian philosophical discourse. That is not something that comes without real mental effort, the only way words can be chosen so felicitously. ‘But when we concentrate within ourselves, when we draw away from everything around us and become more subtle and refined in mind, then the soul comes into its own and works to its fullest power’ (117).

In the course Know Thyself, and later in Wittgenstein,¹⁵ and again, if only briefly, elsewhere, we have touched on, or rather been touched by the angelic wing of, the topic of ‘the double’. This is a topic so personal to me that I have yet to make up my mind whether or not to go public on it. But here too, following on from the paragraph from which the last quotation was taken, on the soul’s coming into its own, the topic seems once more to sear me in passing and disappear. The soul’s breaking out of its prison continues to be discussed:

[T]here are people (even such as are not given to prayer, but who have this sort of power, or gain it during sickness) who see light even in the darkest of rooms, as though it streamed from every article in it [this is the same as the logos of things discussed in earlier lectures, Bibikhin], and see things by it [their invisibility means that they are radiating their essence]; who see their doubles¹⁶ and enter into the thoughts of other people. (117)

The soul released from prison lives in a state of stable, constant celebration.

I felt there was no happier person on earth than I, and I doubted if there could be greater and fuller happiness in the kingdom of Heaven…. Everything drew me to love and thank God…. Sometimes I felt as light as though I had no body and was floating happily through the air instead of walking. Sometimes when I withdrew into myself I saw clearly all my internal organs, and was filled with wonder at the wisdom with which the human body is made. Sometimes I felt as joyful as if I had been made Tsar. And at all such times of happiness, I wished that God would let death come to me quickly, and let me pour out my heart in thankfulness at His feet in the world of spirits. (118)

This part of the text would arouse the ire of Olga Sedakova, who is repelled by the Pilgrim and scents the ‘stench of death’ coming from him.¹⁷ She is disturbed that his tales seem to be turning into something akin to scripture.

It is difficult to discuss the nature of the change that comes over the Pilgrim because it is again connected with the theme of the double, which has been little researched. They ‘see their doubles and enter into the thoughts of other people’.

The self-acting prayer in my heart never hindered things, nor was hindered by them. If I am working at anything the Prayer goes on by itself in my heart, and the work gets on faster. If I am listening carefully to anything, or reading, the Prayer never stops, at one and the same time I am aware of both[!] just as if I were made into two people, or as if there were two souls in my one body.¹⁸ Lord! what a mysterious thing man is! (56–7)

This discovery of the two became possible precisely because they had come into harmony. Otherwise they would not have seen each other and would not have been surprised to find they were different. The double is, in fact, no less strange and remote, we read in the continuation of that paragraph, than a wolf in the forest. Deep in the forest, a wolf attacks the Pilgrim but runs away because it feels the contact with the change that has occurred in him; it can feel its power. The double is as inaccessible as the wolf in the forest.

Is it possible to reach the double through compulsion, as it is possible to force oneself to repeat a prayer 12,000 times a day? There is a distinct and comprehensive answer. The double, my double, simply will not compel himself to do that or anything else, any more than the wolf in the forest. Unceasing prayer is something very different from an exercise.