The Russian Century

“Of course, God is creator of all in the universe,” I thought, “but that still doesn’t mean that people could see Him or that He could give them some sort of commandments. Can we fathom the soul of an ant? Can an ant understand us? In religions, man has simply tried to comprehend God in human terms.”

Then I began to reason somewhat differently. Of course, the difference between man and God is infinitely greater than the difference between an ant and man. And it’s true that an ant can never comprehend man, just as man cannot conceive the psychology of an ant. But man did not create ants. He himself, the same as ants, was created by God. So why couldn’t God understand His creations? After all, to understand something does not mean to become identical with it. So just maybe, religion is a case of God coming down to man’s level to show him how he ought to live, so that humanity would be better off. The same way we tell children that they shouldn’t play with matches.

In a similar fashion I came gradually to approach the notion of immortality. Well, fine, we die and our body rots, but what about our thoughts and feelings? Surely it cannot be that our thoughts and deeds, our commands to our body, our will and mind, originate in the dead gray matter in our heads— matter which we have named, the composition of which we know and can discuss. What is thought, after all? Something immaterial. You can’t touch or weigh it. And how can something material create the immaterial?

Then I considered that we have something in us that does not decay, because it is not subject to decay. And that this something neither dies nor is born, because birth and death are material categories. Can that which cannot be felt, weighed or measured be born? Are molecules born and do they die?

I no longer believed the theory of evolution.

“Evolution exists, but within certain limitations,” I decided. Certain muscles can be developed with protracted, regular exercise. But no matter how long you flap your arms, even for a million years, they will never become wings—that I could not believe. That would be a miracle, and what miracles can there be without God?

I was now ready for religion, but which was the true one? For truth must be singular, and there are many religions.

Valerii Leviatov, My Path to God

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Together with the appearance and development of my belief in God and immortality, I was becoming more and more drawn to Christianity, largely under the influence of Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

I was struck by The Humiliated and Insulted, the first novel by Dostoevsky that I read. Everything I had read prior to that seemed either a saccharine depiction of life, or hopeless despair. While here I saw a life full of suffering, people who were humiliated and insulted; yet when I turned the last page, I was filled with joy. These degraded and abused people were not alone; they loved each other and helped others like themselves, or even those more humbled than themselves. These people did not place their faith in any bright future for society, but in God; they loved not society in the abstract, but people as they were. Life was difficult for them, but they were not unhappy.

What makes man unhappy? Wanting something for himself that he is not granted. Others, who also want something for themselves, don’t let him have what he wants, and they in turn also suffer. But what if you are able to forget yourself? To uproot your selfishness, and to make the happiness of others your purpose in life? If your guiding principle becomes not “take,” but “give,” then your happiness will depend on how much good you give others. And this depends, not on fate, but upon you yourself. And misfortunes won’t be able to make you unhappy, because your own injuries won’t matter to you.

With a guiding principle such as this, a person can be happy in the face of any social injustice, inequality, and so on. He won’t be bothered by the fact that others live better than he does—he will be glad for them.

And then I realized that this way was the only true way to universal happiness and the kingdom of good that I had dreamed of since childhood. Since it’s not society that is bad, but man himself, then however many revolutions you have, it will only be like running in place. The have-nots envy the rich, take their wealth from them and themselves become the rich (“he who was nothing has become everything”), society once again is divided along the lines of rich and poor, and so on forever. Because the very desire for equity is founded on selfishness: a person thinks that he has not received his fair share and undertakes to establish equity. Yet when every person will be glad, when he can give more to another than he takes for himself (as parents are happy, when they give the tastiest bits to their children)—that’s when true justice will come into being. And this universal happiness will not be dependent on universal well-being. Material well-being has never made people happy. But they can be happy in poverty. That’s why the teaching that presumes the establishment of a paradise on earth together with the attainment of universal abundance is utopian. The maxim “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is wrong. It will never be possible to satisfy man’s unbridled desires (recall the fable “The Fisherman and the Fish”).

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Chapter Twenty-Eight

There is another thing that I then understood: The only thing that can truly transform a person is to love all people, including the wicked, and to answer evil with good. While in most cases, evil begets evil.

Throughout history, humanity on the whole has lived according to the rule “an eye for and eye”—and what is the result? Endless suffering. Auschwitz and hydrogen bombs. Because an evil plus an evil equals two evils.

My final turning point occurred after Crime and Punishment. In Raskol-nikov I recognized my former self, and in the collapse of his worldview, the collapse of mine. And our savior was the righteous sinner, Sonia Marmeladov with the Gospel in hand.

Dostoevsky brought to me fragments of the Gospel, and these fragments seemed more wonderful than anything I had known. I remember how, when I had read the final page, I went outside. There was a fine, light rain and the wind was blowing. I wandered the streets of Moscow that night and thought about how the next day, I would begin a new life, quite different from the one I had known until then.

But this new belief of mine still was not true religiosity. It was rather a reasoned belief. I simply considered that it was more proper, more reasonable to live in such a fashion (while acknowledging immortality, of course). Without that, this new life was just as senseless as everything else. Having been taught to be rational, I could not grasp the irrational. To me, the rituals of the Church seemed senseless, games old women played. Well, what would possibly occur if I were dunked in water or if I crossed myself? Then once, already as one who acknowledged the teachings of Christ and who sympathized with religion, I dropped by a church—just to take a look. The impression was incredible. Yes, it was all ornate, but the theater can also be ornate. But I was gripped by a feeling that I had never experienced in any theater. Most importantly, after that visit I became much stronger in my Christian convictions, and a simple thought occurred to me: we cannot simply think and feel, we must also express our thoughts and feelings symbolically. Our every word is in fact a symbol. Yet it doesn’t seem odd to us when we, upon greeting someone, say “hello” and shake his hand. The rituals of the Church are also symbols that cannot be dispensed with. Without them the faith within one’s soul will wither.

After that I had no doubts in the necessity of baptism. If the human soul in all its forms senses the difference between good and evil, and, with rare exceptions, a person who commits a vile act knows that he behaves wrongly, not humanely, and since there is nothing more humane than Christianity—it follows that in Christianity there is truth. (Later I became convinced of this in practice. And I think that if every person were to analyze his life without atheistic superstitions and prejudice, he would become convinced of the same.) A