Vladimir Bibikhin - The Woods

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. 3Grace 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. 4If, 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. 5Sedakova 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!’ 6Forgetting 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.