“It’s possible to make use of the words ‘culture’ and ‘epochs.’ But they are so differently understood. In view of the uncertainty of their meaning, we won’t resort to them. Let’s replace them with other expressions.
“I’d say that a human being is made up of two parts. Of God and work. The development of the human spirit breaks down into separate works of enormous duration. They were realized in the course of generations and followed one after the other. Egypt was such a work, Greece was such a work, the biblical prophets’ knowledge of God was such a work. Such a work—the latest in time, not yet supplanted by anything else, performed by the entire inspiration of our time—is Christianity.
“In order to present to you in all its freshness and unexpectedness, not as you yourself know and are used to it, but more simply, more directly, what it brought that was new and unprecedented, I’ll analyze several fragments of liturgical texts with you, very few and brief ones.
“Most hymns are formed by juxtaposing images from the Old and New Testaments. Instances from the old world—the burning bush, the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the youths in the fiery furnace, Jonah in the belly of the whale, and so on—are compared with instances from the new, for example, the Mother of God’s conception and the Resurrection of Christ.
“In this frequent, almost constant matching, the oldness of the old, the newness of the new, and their difference appear with particular distinctness.
“In a whole multitude of verses, the virgin motherhood of Mary is compared with the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews. For instance, in the verses of ‘In the Red Sea, a type of the virgin bride was figured’ it is said: ‘After Israel’s passage, the sea remained impassable; after Emmanuel’s birth the undefiled one remained intact.’7 In other words, the waters of the sea closed after the crossing of Israel, and the Virgin remained intact after giving birth to the Lord. What sort of incidents are made parallel here? Both events are supernatural, both are equally recognized as miracles. In what did these two different times, the ancient, primitive time and the new, post-Roman time, which was far more advanced, see a miracle?
“In the one case, by the command of the people’s leader, the patriarch Moses, and by the swinging of his magic rod, the sea opens up, lets a whole nation pass across it, a countless multitude, hundreds of thousands, and when the last one has crossed, closes again, and covers and drowns the pursuing Egyptians. A spectacle in the ancient spirit, the elements obedient to the magician’s voice, the great thronging multitudes, like Roman armies on the march, the people and their leader, things visible and invisible, stunning.
“In the other case, a maiden—an ordinary thing, the ancient world wouldn’t have paid attention to it—secretly and quietly gives life to a child, brings life into the world, the miracle of life, the life of all, He who is ‘the Life of all,’ as he was later called. Her childbirth is unlawful not only from the point of view of the scribes, being outside wedlock. It also contradicts the laws of nature. The maiden gives birth not by force of necessity, but by miracle, by inspiration. It is that very inspiration upon which the Gospel, by opposing the exception to the rule and the feast to the everyday, wants to build a life contrary to all constraint.
“What an enormously significant change! How is it that for heaven (because it is in the eyes of heaven that this must be evaluated, before the face of heaven, in the sacred framework of uniqueness in which it is all accomplished)—how is it that for heaven a private human circumstance, negligible from the point of view of antiquity, became equivalent to the migration of an entire people?
“Something shifted in the world. Rome ended, the power of numbers, the necessity, imposed by arms, of living en masse, as a whole population. Leaders and nations became things of the past.
“The person, the preaching of freedom came to supplant them. An individual human life became God’s story, filling the space of the universe with its content. As it’s said in one of the hymns of the Annunciation, Adam wanted to become God and made a mistake and did not become Him, but now ‘God becomes man, so as to make Adam God.’ ”8
Sima went on:
“I’ll tell you something else on that same theme in a moment. But meanwhile a small digression. In relation to the care for workers, the protection of mothers, the struggle with the power of capital, our revolutionary time is an unprecedented, unforgettable time, with achievements that will abide for a long time, forever. As for the understanding of life, the philosophy of happiness that’s being propagated now, it’s simply hard to believe that it’s spoken seriously, it’s such a ridiculous remnant. These declamations about leaders and people could send us back to Old Testament times of cattle-breeding tribes and patriarchs, if they had the power to reverse the course of time and throw history back thousands of years. Fortunately, that’s impossible.
“A few words about Christ and Mary Magdalene. This isn’t from the Gospel account of her, but from the prayers of Holy Week, I think from Holy Tuesday or Wednesday. But you know that without me, Larissa Fyodorovna. I simply want to remind you of a thing or two, and not at all to lecture you.
“ ‘Passion’ in Slavonic, as you know perfectly well, first of all means ‘suffering,’ the Passion of our Lord, ‘the Lord goeth to His voluntary passion’ (that is, to His voluntary suffering). Besides that, the word is used in the later Russian meaning of vices and lusts. ‘Having enslaved the dignity of my soul to passions, I turned into a beast,’ ‘Having been expelled from paradise, let us strive to enter it by abstention from passions,’ and so on. I’m probably very depraved, but I don’t like the pre-Easter readings in that line, devoted to harnessing sensuality and mortifying the flesh. It always seems to me that these crude, flat prayers, lacking in the poetry proper to other spiritual texts, were composed by greasy, fat-bellied monks. And the point is not that they themselves did not live by their own rules and deceived others. Suppose they even lived according to conscience. The point isn’t them, but the content of these texts. These laments give unnecessary significance to various infirmities of the body and to whether it is well-fed or famished. It’s disgusting. Here a dirty, inessential secondariness is raised to an undue, inappropriate height. Forgive me for putting off the main thing like this. I’ll reward you presently for the delay.
“It has always interested me why the mention of Mary Magdalene is placed just before Easter, on the threshold of Christ’s end and His resurrection. I don’t know the reason, but the reminder of what life is comes so timely at the moment of taking leave of it and on the threshold of its return. Now listen with what genuine passion, with what directness regardless of anything, this mention is made.
“There’s a debate about whether it’s Mary Magdalene, or Mary of Egypt, or some other Mary. Whoever she may be, she asks the Lord: ‘Loose my debt as I have loosed my hair.’ That is: ‘Release me from guilt, just as I have released my hair.’ How materially the thirst for forgiveness, for repentance, is expressed! You can touch it with your hands.
“And there is a similar exclamation in another hymn for the same day, a more detailed one, which we can refer with greater certainty to Mary Magdalene.
“Here, with terrible tangibility, she laments for her past, for the fact that every night her former, inveterate habits flare up in her. ‘For I live in the night of licentiousness, shrouded in the dark and moonless love of sin.’ She asks Christ to accept her tears of repentance and incline His ear to the sighing of her heart, so that she may wipe His most pure feet with her hair, with which the stunned and ashamed Eve covered herself in paradise. ‘Once Eve heard Thy footstep in paradise in the cool of day and in fear ran and hid herself. But now I will tenderly embrace
