CHAPTER II
The case of the heretics was investigated by the newly established Holy Synod.
The runaway Cossack, Averian Bespaly, and his sister, Akoulína, were condemned to suffer death on the wheel. The rest, after being flogged and having their nostrils torn, were condemned, the men to forced labour, and the women to weaving-workshops and prison-cloisters.
Tichon, who nearly died of his wound in the prison hospital, was saved by his former protector, James Vilimovitch Bruce. Bruce took him to his house to recover, and interceded with the Bishop of Novgorod, Feofan Prokopovitch, on his behalf. Feofan became interested in Tichon; he wanted to display towards him that pastoral mercy for erring sheep which he was always preaching: “Opponents of the Church ought to be met with kindness and reason, and not as they are nowadays with hard words and alienation.” At the same time he hoped that Tichon’s abjuration of the heresy and his return to the fold of the Orthodox Church would serve as an example to other heretics and Raskolniks.
Bishop Feofan exempted Tichon from flogging and exile, and took him to Petersburg to do penance in his house.
The bishop’s residence was situated on the Aptekarski Island in a dense pine wood. The library was on the ground floor. Noticing Tichon’s love for books, Feofan gave him permission to put his library in order. It was summer and the days were hot. The windows, which looked straight into the wood, were often left open. The peace of the wood mingled with the peace of the library, the rustle of leaves with the rustle of pages. The woodpecker and cuckoo could be heard. A couple of elks were visible in the clearing of the wood; they had been brought here from the Petrovosky Island, which was wild country at that time. A green twilight filled the room. It was cool and pleasant within. Tichon spent whole days rummaging among the books. He felt as if he had returned to the library of James Bruce, and his four years of wanderings were but a dream.
Bishop Feofan was kind to him. He did not press him to return to the Church. There being no Russian catechism, he chose for Tichon’s reading some German theologians; when he was free he would talk with him about what he had read and correct the Protestant teaching according to the Greco-Russian Church. Otherwise Tichon had entire freedom to do what he liked.
Tichon gave himself up to mathematics. In the calm, cold atmosphere of reason he sought repose from those fires of madness; and the nightmares of the Red and the White Death.
He re-read the philosopher Descartes, Leibnitz and Spinoza. And the words of Pastor Glück, would often come back to him: “True philosophy, when read superficially leads away from God; when studied deeply, leads to Him.”
To Descartes God was the prime mover of the first matter. The universe was a machine. There was neither love nor mystery nor life, nothing except reason, which is reflected in all worlds, as light is reflected in the transparent crystals of the ice. Tichon was frightened by this lifeless God.
“Nature is full of life,” asserted Leibnitz in his Monadology, “I will prove that the origin of every movement is the spirit, and the spirit is a living monad, which is made up of ideas, as the centre is made up of angels.” All monads are united into a whole by the pre-established harmony of God. “The universe is God’s clock, horologium Dei.” “Again instead of life, a machine; instead of God, mechanics,” thought Tichon, and once more dread took hold of him.
But the most dreadful, because the most lucid, was Spinoza. He expressed what the others dared not say. “To assert that God took on Himself the nature of man, is as foolish as to assert that a circle had assumed the nature of a triangle or a square. ‘The word became flesh’ is an Eastern phrase, which has no meaning whatever in the light of reason. Christianity is distinguished from other religions not by faith nor by love, nor by its gifts of the Holy Spirit, but only by the fact that it is founded on a miracle, that is ignorance, which is the source of all evil, and in this way the faith itself is transformed into superstition.” Spinoza revealed the secret thought of all modern philosophers: either with Christ against reason or with reason against Christ.
One day Tichon spoke of Spinoza to Bishop Feofan.
“This philosophy is based on absurdities,” declared the bishop with a disdainful smile. “He has woven his reasoning out of contradictions and hid his lack of intelligence in pompous and sonorous words.”
This abuse neither convinced nor tranquillized Tichon. The works of the foreign theologians also helped him but little; they dismissed all ancient and modern philosophers as easily as the Russian bishop had done Spinoza.
Sometimes Feofan would let Tichon copy papers concerning the affairs of the Holy Synod. He was struck by the wording of the oath in the Ecclesiastical Regulations: “I swear to recognise as supreme judge of this College the Monarch of all the Russians, our most gracious Sovereign.” The Sovereign—the head of the Church, the Sovereign in the place of Christ!
“Magnus ille Leviathan, quae Civitas appelatur, officium artis est et Homo artificialis.” Tichon remembered reading those words in “Leviathan,” written by the English philosopher Hobbes, who asserted that the Church should be part of the Empire, a member of the great Leviathan, the gigantic automaton. “Is it not the image of the beast created in the image of the god-beast, which is spoken of in Revelation?” Tichon wondered.
The cold reasonableness of this lifeless church of a lifeless God chilled Tichon and became as unbearable to him as the fire of passionate madness, the fire of the Red and White Death.
The day had been fixed when Tichon should be solemnly anointed with holy baptismal oils in the Troïtsa Church, as a mark of his return to the Orthodox Church.
On the eve of that day Bishop Feofan had visitors.
In his Latin letters, Feofan termed such assemblies “noctes atticae.” Pickles and fumados were served and washed down with the famous beer brewed by Father Gerasem, that stout economist. They discoursed on philosophy and the “laws of nature” in a free “liberal” tone, that is, they talked atheism.
Tichon listened to the conversation from the glazed gallery which united the dining room with the library.
“Disputes on the subject of faith can never arise between men of great intelligence,” Bruce was saying, “for an intelligent man does not question the faith of another. Be he Lutheran, Calvinist or Pagan, it is not the faith but the actions and character alone which count.”
“Ubi boni vini non est quaerenda regio, sic nec boni viri religio et patria,” replied Feofan.
“Those who condemn philosophy are either ignorant or else over-cunning priests,” remarked Basil Nikitch Tatesheff, President of the Mine Department.
Father Marcellus, a learned monk, demonstrated that many of the records of the lives of saints are without foundation in fact.
“There is much deception, much deception”; he repeated the celebrated saying of Theodosius.
“Miracles don’t happen nowadays,” agreed Doctor Blumentrost.
“I went to see a friend recently,” began Tolstoi with a malicious smile, “and there I met two non-commissioned officers. They were arguing together. One affirmed, the other denied the existence of God. The free-thinker cried, ‘Don’t waste your breath, there is no God.’ I joined in the conversation and asked, ‘Who told you that God did not exist?’ ‘Sub-lieutenant Ivanoff told it me so yesterday, at the Gostinni-Dvor.’ ‘He has chosen a nice place to announce it in, indeed,’ said I.”
All laughed.
But Tichon, again, grew afraid. He saw the end of all this. He felt certain that these men were on a road which it was impossible not to follow to that end; and that sooner or later, they, the Russians, would reach the stage which had already been reached in Europe; and either stand with Christ against reason, or with reason against Christ.
He returned to the library and sat down at the window next to the wall, lined with books in uniform leather parchment bindings. He gazed at the sky, white over the black pines, the empty lifeless abyss of the sky, and remembered the words of Spinoza.
“There is as much in common between God and man as between the constellation of the Dog and the barking animal. Man can love God, but God cannot love man.”
And it seemed to him that in that lifeless sky there dwelt a lifeless God, incapable of love. It were better to know that God did not exist. “Perhaps He really does not exist,” he thought, and he felt the same terror as in the moment when the baby Ivanoushka cried and Averian, with his raised knife, had smiled.
Tichon fell on his knees and began to pray. Looking up to heaven he repeated one word again and again:—
“Lord, Lord, Lord!”
But the heavens remained silent. Silence was in Tichon’s heart. Infinite silence, infinite terror.
Suddenly out of the depths of this silence a voice replied and told him what had to be done.
Tichon straightway rose, went into his cell, pulled his sack out from under the bed, took from it his old monk’s habit, the leathern belt, the rosary, the hood, the little icon of St. Sophia, the Wisdom of God, given to him by the girl Sophia; he took off his kaftan and the rest of the foreign dress he wore, put on the religious habit, fastened round his shoulders the wallet, took the staff, made the sign of the cross and, unnoticed by any one, passed out of the house into the wood.
The next morning, when it was time to go to church for the rite of anointing, Tichon was called. For a long time he was vainly sought; he had disappeared, leaving no trace behind him. Had he vanished into space?