Vladimir Bibikhin - The Woods

Even a less striking overpopulation in the classical world brought the Trojan War down on humankind, and the earth’s vengeance on the big city will be infinitely more terrible. A return to religion, that is, to philosophy – but not by any stretch of the imagination to that sick counterfeit, religious philosophy – seems almost certain.

Trains, planes, and cars encompass not matter but a pre-identified business segment. Tourists imagine they are broadening their narrow horizons and seeing the world, but in reality they are mere exploiters, blissfully unaware that they are only tightening the grip of industrialization. There is good reason to refer to their activities as the tourist industry. Criticism of civilization, by keeping it in the headlines, only serves to consolidate it.

There is something strangely hopeful and offbeat, something almost of the holy fool, about the lands of Russia and the way that here the sprawling of our standardized cities over the plains is dysfunctional, tentative, as if subverted in advance by our nervous haste, the provisional nature of almost all decisions, and the manifest absence of any trustworthy, long-term strategy such as we find, for example, in America. There is no call for us to envy America its strategy, with its centuries-long perspective (in the conservation of forests, in the deliberate limiting of arable land, and its preference for buying in oil rather than extracting it locally). By contrast, our own strategy seems short of breath, not to say suffocating. Why? Because where exploitation of the earth is concerned it is better not to have a strategy than to have one. The only right approach is to recognize that what matters is not know-how or the lack of it, but awareness that the world’s Sophia is not to be found in technology, however ultramodern and sophisticated. In the absurd rootlessness of our technological invasion of the forest, of which a glaring and literal example is the ridiculous building of opulent villas in Moscow province by people unfortunate enough to have picked up all the money they found lying at their feet (just as the communists had the misfortune to seize power that was theirs for the taking), we seem to believe that, because of a drowsy awareness that it will not be human intelligence that puts everything back in place, all attempts to behave rationally should be shunned.

1 1. Religion meant connection only in the primitive Christian imagination of Lactantius. The true etymology is re-lego, from ‘legere’, respect for heritage, awe. [AM]

2 2. Vasilisk of Turov (d. 1824) was an Orthodox monk who lived in the wilderness in Siberia. He was canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2004. Zosima Verkhovskii (1768–1833) was an Orthodox schema monk (from the Greek word σχῆμα – image) who founded two convents. [AM]

3 3. Arsenii Troepol’skii (1804–70) was an Orthodox spiritual writer of the Hesychast tradition. [AM]

4 4. Ignatii Brianchaninov (1807–67) was a theologian of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was canonized as a saint in 1988. [AM]

5 5. Feofan the Recluse (1815–94) was a bishop, theologian, and a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church (canonized in 1988). [AM]

6 6. Neprestanno molites’!, p. 143. [Russian editors]

7 7. Palama, Triady I, 1, 7. [Bibikhin] See Sv. Grigorii Palama, Triady v zash-chitu sviashchenno-bezmolvstvuiushchikh, tr. Vladimir Bibikhin (St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2014), p. 15. [O.E. Lebedeva]

8 8. The Way of a Pilgrim, p. 251. [Tr.]

9 9. This section is not in the English translation of The Way of a Pilgrim being used. See Otkrovennye rasskazy strannika dukhovnomu svoemu ottsu, ‘Prilozheniia. Tri kliucha ko vnutrennei molitvennoi sokrovishchnitse i svia-tootecheskie nastavleniia o molitve’, section B 1: ‘Izrecheniia Isikhiia presvitera Ierusalimskogo’, part 4, ‘Vnimanie – chtoby vsegda derzhat’ …’ ( http://www.hesychasm.ru/library/strannik/txt05.htm). [Tr.]

10 10. This is one philosophy which is always only too much in evidence. There is another: ‘Why did I prefer vain reputation above all else? … Why did I not love the fair fragrance of the divine prayers and psalms, not bow my head before the bishops? Why did I shun, not the world, but the holiness of the heavenly way of life, angelic philosophy and never-waning glory?’ Archmandrite Mikhail (Kozlov), Zapiski i pis’ma (Moscow: Bogoroditse-Rozhdestvenskii Bobrenev monastyr’ Moskovskoi eparkhii, 1996), p. 53. He signs his letters ‘Makarii Kozlov, a sinful pilgrim’, or just ‘Makarii Kozlov, pilgrim’. [Bibikhin]

11 11. Otkrovennye rasskazy, ‘Prilozhenie (glavnye raznochteniia iz pervogo kazanskogo izdaniia 1881 goda i afonskoi panteleimonovskoi rukopisi No. 50/4/395)’, n.2, ‘Iz vsekh molitv …’. ( http://www.hesychasm.ru/library/strannik/txt09.htm). [Tr.]

12 12. The Way of a Pilgrim, p. 246. [Tr.]

13 13. Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900) was a great Russian religious philosopher, poet, and mystical writer. See Solov’ev, Sophia, God and a Short Tale About the Antichrist: Also Including At the Dawn of Mist-Shrouded Youth, ed. and tr. Boris Jakim (New York: Semantorn, 2014). [AM]

14 14. Otkrovennye rasskazy, ‘Prilozhenie’, section A 4, ‘Nastavlenie Ignatiia i Kallista’, ‘Vedai i to chto …’. [Tr.]

15 15. Ibid., section B 1, ‘Izrecheniia Isikhiia Presvitera Ierusalimskogo’, part 15, ‘Dolzhno vseuserdno peshchis’ o sokhranii …’. [Tr.]

16 16. Bibikhin’s italics. [Tr.]

17 17. Otkrovennye rasskazy, ‘Prilozhenie’, section B 2, ‘Izrecheniia Filofeia Sinaiskogo’, part 7, ‘Vsiakii chas i vsiakoe mgnovenie …’. [Tr.]

18 18. Psalms, 16: 8. [Tr.]

19 19. See Heidegger, Being and Time. See ‘Angst’, ‘Boredom’, and ‘Fear’, in Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, pp. 15–18. [AM]

20 20. Y.M. Lotman and B.A. Uspensky, The Semiotics of Russian Culture, ed. Ann Shukman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). [AM]

Something very notable is our widespread, distraught nostalgia for the forest, our hopeless dream of somehow still being able to escape back into it: for example, by concealing upmarket residential estates in its depths. That is about as sensible as trying to get back to nature by swimming or sunbathing on the beach.

The desire to gain a suntan, or to move out of the city, or to agonize about the environment, all point to the fact that our present way of life is manifestly unsustainable, ‘marked’ in the sense of structural linguistics. Ask anyone why it is unsustainable, since when and, most importantly, to what end. One person may say that human life on earth has always been stressful and under threat. Maybe so. That certainly seems to be the case today. For us, all that is noteworthy about this is that the voices around us vehemently assert that ‘today it is clearer than ever before’, or that this or that ‘continues to be crystal clear’, or that humankind needs to do one thing, was wrong to do another thing, will have to pay if it does not do something else, or has really got it coming to it this time. Stress is difficult to bear without talking fearfully. Our definition of the core of human nature as being religion and philosophy, as unceasing mindfulness, and, in response to stress, even more mindfulness, tells us to be wary of all clichés but pay attention to everything people say. What is, is: what is not, is not. We may perhaps even agree that the earth is sick, not because we have made a diagnosis, but simply because that is what a lot of people are saying and there seems to be no great harm in it. Or is there? At all events, science by its very nature will be unable to reach any conclusion about that because it has no experience of diseases of cosmic entities. Well, unless Mars is a precedent.