RUSSIA’S GNOSTIC UNDERGROUND
LOVE & ECSTASY RUSSIA’S GNOSTIC UNDERGROUND
Russia and the Coming Age of the Spirit
LOVE & ECSTASY
RUSSIA’S GNOSTIC UNDERGROUND
And they add Jesus taught his Apostles a secret doctrine and charged them to transmit it to those who would be capable of understanding it. It is faith and love which save. All the rest is a matter of indifference.
— Church Father Irenaeus (speaking of the Gnostics)
Here is a widespread motif: the belief that you can awaken spiritual energy through the mastery of sex. It fascinated Russian thinkers like Fedorov, Solovyov, and Berdyaev. Nietzsche described the ascetic as somebody burning with the will to power, which applies to the Russian Khlysty who thought that by mastering their carnal natures, they would transcend human laws. We are familiar with the type, the so-called “Antinomians” — weird progeny, I suppose, of Jesus who healed, contrary to Jewish law, on the Sabbath.
— Michael Grosso, Millennium Myth
The Gnostic Tradition was represented in the early Christian centuries by a multitude of Secret Schools, communities and Master Teachers. The religious scholar W.H.C. Frend writes that “in the second century gnosticism was a world-wide movement.” There were Gnostic communities in Syria, Greece, Palestine, Rome, Egypt, North Africa and Western Europe. With the rise of the Church of Rome and the widespread persecution unleashed on ‘dissident Christians’, Gnostics found refuge in the desert hermitages of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. Gnostic truths were preserved within the ascetic tradition of the Byzantine Church. After the conversion of Russia to Byzantine Christianity, Gnostic doctrines heavily influenced the Russian Orthodox Church. The ancient wisdom took root in the Russian Orthodox ascetic religious communities. In the words of G.P. Fedotov, “the countries of the East were the homelands not only of great religions and artistic cultures, but deep thought.” Orthodox Christianity, true to its Eastern origin, developed in a way completely different from Western Christendom.
OLD BELIEVERS
The Russian Old Believers (Raskolniki) originated in the widespread 17th century resistance to the centralisation and reforms of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Nikon. Nikon was a tyrant who tortured and imprisoned believers opposed to his revision of the service and prayer book of the Russian Church. Before the time of Nikon, who became Orthodox Patriarch through his friendship with Tsar Alexis, the Russian Church was largely decentralised, a characteristic of the earliest Christian communities that thrived in the first three centuries A.D. The priest being no more than a shepherd or servant of the community. Believing merriment to be diabolical, the puritanical Nikon persuaded the Tsar to ban musical instruments and make Sunday Church attendance obligatory. Nikon’s reforms also struck at the mystic quest for the Kingdom of Righteousness. Many Russians believed that Nikon’s actions were the work of the evil prince of this world, and that Antichrist had taken control of Church and State. The True God had forsaken the Tsar and the official Orthodox faith.
Deserting the mainstream Church, the Russian dissenters, in the opinion of the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, “began to live in the past and in the future but not in the present.” The Old Believers, like the early Christians, actually consisted of numerous branches or schools. Many were convinced they now lived in a new dispensation, one completely governed by Antichrist.
The consecration of priests and celebration of all the sacraments including marriage was thus impossible. Such ideas aimed to transform each man and woman into a celibate ascetic striving for personal salvation in a God-forsaken, evil world. Rejecting priestly authority, these Old Believers inspired a radical communitarianism, the formation of small, tightly knit, homogeneous communities. Others, believing the Church to be the Mystical Body of Christ ever present in the world, continued to ordain their own clerics.
The Old Believers were totally different from the European Protestants, who wanted to return to an imaginary evangelical fundamentalism. The Old Believers saw themselves as custodians of the Eastern Christian Tradition as it had been carried from Rome to Constantinople to Moscow — the Third Rome. Russia being the last repository of undefiled Truth. They were expelled and hunted down by a reformist Orthodox Church that forfeited its heavenly calling by embracing heresy. Albert F. Heard, in The Russian Church and Russian Dissent, says:
Here lies the essential difference between Russian Raskol [Old Believers] and German Protestantism: the one is sectional, narrow-minded, bigoted, jealous, and pharisaic; the other is universal, whole-souled, liberal, generous, and tolerant.
These Old Believers, claiming descent from Christ’s disciples, denounced the nominal “Orthodox Christians” as worldly and spiritually barren. After the manner of the apostolic communities, they insisted on the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. The gifted and scholarly Russian Archpriest Avvakum, the most prominent leader of the Old Believers, was said to be possessed by a unique measure of the Holy Spirit. For Avvakum and the Old Believers, the Spirit of Truth, not hierarchies of men, led true believers in their daily lives, revealing anew the secrets of the Kingdom of God. Renowned for his saintliness and healing powers, Avvakum, according to some of his followers, had realised oneness with the Christ. In this state of divine intoxication, he is said to have written: “Heaven is mine and the earth is mine, the light is mine and mine is every created thing.”
A couple of centuries earlier, the Persian Sufi mystic al-Hallaj, in a state of ecstatic union with God, similarly declared, “I am the Absolute.” This venerable Sufi saint was publicly executed by orthodox Muslims. His body scourged, gibbeted, and finally decapitated by the Muslim faithful. Nicholas Berdyaev says of Avvakum: “The tortures and the agonies of mind and body which Avvakum bore were beyond human strength to endure.”
The Old Believers suffered merciless persecution at the hands of the Tsarist State and the officially sanctioned clergy. Nevertheless, they continued to be revered as the custodians of an ancient spiritual inheritance that had assumed an indigenous Russian form.
Monasticism was
central to the Old Believers spiritual practice. One American historian offers
the following description of an Old Believer monastery in Russia’s extreme
north:
anti-Western, anti-militarist, and anti-expansionist. It provided communal
ownership of property, collective labor, and mutual aid in a religious
surrounding, far from the center of state power….It was also hierarchical and
regimented: discipline, obedience, loyalty, and chastity were required.
Out of this largely underground religious rebellion came the Stranniki, or “wanderers,” who held that as this world can never be the home of the Elect they must wander the earth with no permanent abode. Such wandering being essential for one who is seeking redemption and illumination. They took up the wandering life of preaching and healing in order to undergo certain initiatory trials. These wandering holy ones became renowned for their remarkable powers of prophecy and healing. They discouraged marriage, and their ascetic lifestyle and inner orientation freed them from social conventions. They severed all bonds with society (including money, passports and official documents) as signs of the Antichrist. Having renounced the fleeting life of this world, the Stranniki forbid all attachments, particularly reproduction that binds man to society.
Benjamin Walker
explains in his book Gnosticism: Its History and Influence:
All these sects operated under the constant threat of persecution, and whenever
their more extreme activities came to light they were treated with the most
stringent severity, being subjected to confiscation of property, exile to
Siberia, knouting, torture, and occasionally beheading. For the most part, they
lived simply and avoided getting entangled with the Church or State. Like other
such sects they tended to treat marriage as an accursed bond.
One of Archpriest Avvakum’s followers, Danila Filippov, a devout peasant, also experienced union with the Christ. After much prayer, penance and mystic contemplation, Filippov had an ecstatic vision in which he saw God descend with a host of angels and enter his body. Like Jesus at His baptism in Jordan, the spirit of God came upon Filippov and he realised oneness with the Christ. From that moment Danila Filippov, a living embodiment of the Christ, began to teach, attracting a large following among Russia’s religious dissenters.
Danila Filippov
is credited with popularising esoteric truths and ancient mysteries that were an
integral part of the Russian Church prior to the heretical revisions of
Patriarch Nikon. This helps explain why his message was popular with a
significant number of the Russian people. Some Old Believers contended that
Archpriest Avvakum had united with Christ while still in the flesh. A number of
Russian believers revered the legend of Averzhan, a living Christ, who Dmitri
Donskoi crucified on the battlefield of Kulikovo in 1380. Another Christed one,
Yemeljan, suffered horribly under Tsar Ivan the Terrible.
In publicly proclaiming that man may become one with the Christ, Filippov was
only restating a Great Mystery of Eastern Orthodox theology, the doctrine of theosis.
Maximus the Confessor, the most significant Byzantine theologian of the 7th century, wrote that the true Christian’s goal is nothing short of deification. “While remaining in his soul and body entirely man by nature, he becomes in his soul and body entirely god by grace.” Maximus drew his ideas principally from the Gospel of John and secret Gnostic traditions associated with the first disciples. According to Maximus, God originally created man endowed with a mode of divine and immaterial propagation. Sexual reproduction, like death, is a consequence of the Fall of Adam. The historic incarnation of the Logos — Cosmic Christ — in Jesus the Nazarene had made oneness with God possible, but it is always the grace of God that actualises it. This divine illumination must be sought. Interior prayer, introspection, mystic contemplation, the wandering or monastic life, and renunciation of the ephemeral world, were just gates on a path of God-seeking. Asceticism, understood here as self-mastery, being the way to individual transfiguration. The modern religious scholar Mircea Eliade comments:
Deification is preceded or accompanied by an experience of mystical light. Already among the Desert Fathers, ecstasy manifested itself through phenomena of light. The monks “shone with the light of Grace.” While the recluse was deep in prayer, his cell was entirely illuminated…[T]he same tradition (prayer, mystical light, theosis) is found again among the Hesychastic monks of Mount Athos….In the Eastern church, one finds two complementary tendencies, apparently opposed, which become accentuated with time: on the one hand, the role and ecclesial value of the community of the faithful; on the other, the prestigious authority of the ascetic monks and contemplatives.1
Dionysius the Areopagite, a 5th century Syrian monk often equated with an early follower of St. Paul, wrote of drawing near to God and entering into union with God. His theology, inspired in part by Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, had an immense influence on the Eastern Church. For Dionysius, God is beyond anything that we can understand. God is “the Universal Cause of existence while Itself not existing, for It is beyond all Being.” God is made known to the visible world through a hierarchy of divine beings. The Logos, or the First Emanation of God the Father, manifested in the Man Jesus as the Christ. The Gospel Jesus revealed how man may become one with God through the Logos. Theosis, union with God, explained Dionysius, is only attained by rising above all perception of the senses and reasoning of the mind.
I counsel that, in the earnest exercise of mystic contemplation, you leave the senses and the activities of the intellect and all that the senses or the intellect can perceive, and all in this world of nothingness or in that world of being. Having laid your understanding to rest, strain as far as you can towards a union with Him whom neither being nor understanding can contain. For, by the ceaseless and absolute renunciation of yourself and all things, you shall in purity cast all things aside and be released from them all. So you shall be led upwards to the Ray of that divine Darkness which surpasses all existence.2
In the 10th century, Symeon (949-1022), Abbot of the monastery of St. Macras at Constantinople, wrote that instead of rationally attempting to define God, one should rely on direct personal experience of the divine. As Karen Armstrong explains in her excellent study A History of Religion:
It was
impossible to know God in conceptual terms, as though he were just another being
about which we could form ideas. God was a mystery. A true Christian was one who
had a conscious experience of the God who had revealed himself in the
transfigured humanity of Christ. Symeon had himself been converted from a
worldly life to contemplation by an experience that seemed to be out of the
blue….As God had said to Symeon during one of his visions: “Yes, I am God,
the one who became man for your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you
see, and I shall make you God.” God was not an external, objective fact but an
essentially subjective and personal enlightenment.
The Church Father Clement of Alexandria had said: “That man with whom the
Logos [Divine Word/Christ] dwells…is made like God and is beautiful…[T]hat
man becomes God, for God so wills it….[T]he Logos of God became man that from
man you might learn how man may become God.”
PEOPLE OF GOD
The radical spiritual movements that emerged following the 17th century Schism within Russian Orthodoxy drew inspiration from this rich Eastern Christian mystic tradition, imbued as it was by Gnosticism.
The Russian dissenters represented both a revolt against ecclesiastical tyranny and a grass roots revival of esoteric doctrines protected within the inner sanctums of the Eastern Church. Eastern Christian mysticism fused with the native spirituality of the Slavic soul. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the dissenters who followed Danila Filippov, known as the Khlysty, a name derived from Khylstovschchina, “The Faith of Christ.” They were also called the “People of God,” due to their renowned asceticism, fasting, acts of penance, and the incredible suffering they endured.
The Khlysty, like many Eastern mystics and the 10th century Gnostic Bogomils, divided the world into spirit and flesh, good and evil. The primordial Man was originally an androgynous spiritual being, but the Evil One caused him to ‘Fall’ becoming physical, mortal and sexed. Similarly, the Fall resulted in the originally spiritual Earth becoming dense, material and corrupt, subject to decay and death. An old Slavic apocryphal scripture tells how Satan made Adam sign a ‘contract’, since Earth is the Evil One’s domain, according to which Adam and his descendants belong to him until the coming of the Christ. The symbols of androgynous Man and virgin Earth, both fallen to be restored, are prominent in the Khlysty ritual and doctrine, as we shall later show.
The Khlysty equation of Mother Earth with the Holy Virgin Mary is also drawn from the mystical Russian relationship with the land. The Eastern Slavs saw the Earth, not so much in its material — Fallen — condition, but the heavenly world reflected in it or through it. As one writer explains:
The secret of Russian geography consists in the fact that what the Russian receives from the earth is the light which has first been transmitted to the earth and is then reflected back from it. Thus the Russian really takes from the earth what streams to it from outer regions. The Russian loves his earth, but he loves it because to him it is a reflection of the heavens.3
After the manner of the Eastern mystics, Danila Filippov preached poverty, humility, penitence, and prayer, as part of the path to theosis. Also like the Bogomils (“Beloved of God”), he advised against marriage and urged his followers to abstain from all meat, due to its origin through copulation. Alcohol was also to be avoided. If one of his converts happened to be married, he should separate from his unbelieving wife, and his children should be called “sins”. Wives acquired before joining the Khlysty community were called “gifts of the devil.” New converts were assigned spiritual partners and while they might sleep together, there should be no carnal relation. Filippov put together a book of instruction called the Dove Book, the dove being the symbol in the Gospel for the descent of the Christ on Jesus at His baptism.
Today the Khlysty are most famous for their manner of worship. As a persecuted underground movement, they mostly assembled at night and in utmost secrecy. They gathered in simple halls, furnished with long benches on either side. In the centre was a wooden table on which were placed loaves of bread and pitchers of water. They sometimes gathered in a forest clearing lit by hundreds of tapers. After all the members had assembled and the doors locked, they removed their shoes and coats to reveal white flowing robes. All members carried a simple white handkerchief.
The meetings were presided over by a “Christ” or “Mother of God”. Some scholars speculate that these titles are reminiscent of those used by the Essenes and Nazarene followers of Jesus. Names such as Christ, Mary and Joseph were often used by members to represent roles undertaken in Essene/Nazarene communities. Also the Khlysty use of the term “Christ” testified to their belief that the spirit of Christ did not leave the earth upon the crucifixion of Jesus, but was embodied in various God-realised individuals. “Mother of God” corresponded to Mother Earth, who like Adam, had fallen into matter. The primordial virgin Mother Earth being spiritual and etheric before the attack of Satan.
Usually the meeting opened with the following prayer called the “Prayer of Jesus”:
Give us,
Lord,
To us, Jesus Christ!
Give us, Son of God,
Light: have mercy upon us!
Ruler, Holy Spirit.
Have mercy upon us.
Lady Ruler, our little Mother!
Ask Light, for us,
The Light, thy Son,
The Spirit of God, the Holy One!
Light, by thee are redeemed
Many sinners on the Earth,
Upon the little Mother, unto our Lady Queen,
Light, unto her that cherishes us.
After a brief sermon the members began to sing hymns. A tub of water was generally heated over a fire. As the water started to boil, those who wished to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit and embody the Christ — the “Christ bearers” — joined hands and danced in a circle. As the service reached a climax the hymns got louder and louder and the dancing more and more ecstatic. Some writers say that virgin girls dressed in white robes flogged the dancers with twigs. The celebrants reached a state of spiritual intoxication. They detached themselves from the circle and fell into a trance. In this state of “divine drunkenness” people often fell to the floor, spoke in tongues, and went into bodily ecstasy. After the ceremony the celebrants displayed the power to heal the sick, prophesy, and cast out demons.
The Italian metaphysician Julius Evola offers the following, slightly different, description of a Khlyst ceremony:
The dogmatic premise of the sect is that man is potentially God. By developing awareness of this, he can be God in fact, taking to himself the nature of Christ (whence comes the name of the sect) if he is a man, or that of the Virgin if a woman, through the transfiguring descent of the Holy Ghost, provoked by celebration of a secret midnight rite. The participants, both men and women, wear only a white garment over complete ritual nakedness. While pronouncing invocations, they begin dancing in a circle. The men form a circle in the middle that moves quickly in the direction of the path of the sun, while the women form an outer circle at first and move in the opposite direction to the path of the sun (a ritual reference to the cosmic polarity observed by the sexes). The motion becomes more and more wild and giddy until some of the participants leave the circles and begin dancing alone, like the ancient vertiginatores and Arab dervishes, so fast, it is said, that sometimes their figures can no longer be picked out as they fall and rise again (the dance as a technique of ecstasy). Their frenzy becomes contagious. To increase their exaltation, the men and women, whip each other (pain being an erotic and ecstatic factor). At the peak of this exaltation, the inner transformation, the immanent, invoked descent of the Holy Spirit begins to be foreshadowed. At this point, both men and women strip off their while ritual garments and copulate promiscuously; the drive of the sexual experience and the trauma of coitus bring the rite to its most extreme intensity.4
Evola
recounts the oft repeated charge, made by their Orthodox enemies, that these
secret ceremonies always ended in an unrestrained sexual orgy. Or as one author
put it, the Khlysty engaged in “a kind of lucerna extincta [lights-out]
rite, in which men and women…had intercourse [including] homosexual
intercourse”, to attain an altered state of consciousness. A more reliable,
less sensational account is given in the Cambridge scholar Frederick
Conybeare’s book Russian Dissenters. Conybeare, in fact, found little
evidence of wild sexual orgies among the Khlysty. James Webb, a meticulous
researcher, concludes: “the Khlysts were thought to indulge in unbridled
sexual license; yet there is little evidence other than the accusations of their
enemies that they in fact did so.”5
However, it may be helpful at this juncture, to explore the basis of
these accusations. We know the Khlysty repudiated marriage, openly distaining
conventional family life. Evola admits that “in this sect sex is severely
restricted to this ritual and ecstatic use; in every other respect the sect
professes rigid asceticism and condemns carnal love and even marriage itself.”6
How then did the rumours of wild orgies arise?
Sexual relations, for the majority of the world’s people, are bound up with the biological need to reproduce, as well as the human desire for intimacy. Marriage is a social institution. The ascetic, who forfeits membership in the normal world, renounces family and social ties in deference to the transcendent Kingdom of God. The natural urge to procreate is, like death, a result of the Fall. The genuine ascetic does not suppress this biological urge but masters and transmutes it. He or she redirects the sexual energy away from fleeting pleasures and procreation, into the mystic quest for union with God. The search for human love and intimacy is annihilated in the mystic’s all consuming love for the Eternal One. This is why it is said that the true mystic is always the lover in search of the Beloved.
Having achieved the state of Christhood, oneness with the divine Beloved, the Khlysty ascetic was free from moral laws and social conventions. They were like Christ Jesus who openly contravened the Mosaic Sabbath Law and showed distain for self-righteous authority. He who unites with the infinite Christ does not need puritanical laws regulating finite human actions. God-realisation, divine illumination, carries the one who does not live in the mundane world beyond all accepted norms. This is illustrated in the outcome of an inquiry carried out in the 18th century into a scandal surrounding a Dominican convent.
The nuns of St. Catherine de Prato experienced such an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that they openly declared their essential unity with God. At the official Papal inquiry, one of the nuns expounded on her realisation of the divine within:
It is sufficient to elevate the spirit to God and then no action, whatever it be, is sinful….Love of God and one’s neighbour is the whole of the commandments. Man who unites with God by means of women satisfies both commandments. So also does he who, lifting his spirit to God, has enjoyment with a person of the same sex or alone….In doing that which we erroneously call impure is real purity ordained by God, without which man cannot arrive at a knowledge of Him.7
It is not difficult to see how sexual relations, avoiding the risk of conception, could become sacred acts within Khlysty communities. Indeed in all ages, cultures, and religions, we encounter the mystic notion that identification and union with the deity sets the ascetic free from the rules constraining ordinary carnal men. Filled with the Holy Spirit, their bodies of flesh transformed, they can commit no bodily sins. Sexual repression is out of the question as it only serves to fuel a dangerous imbalance and neurosis. Thus strictly controlled non-reproductive sex may be sanctified by ritual, purified and transformed into an intense embracing of God. The medieval Brethren of the Free Spirit in Western Europe demonstrated the transcendent virtues of such sacred sex, nakedness, and scorn of all man-made conventions.
The allegation of homosexual orgies levelled at the Khlysty by their ignorant enemies can also be understood in the light of the sanctification and transmutation of sexuality. Homosexuality is strictly forbidden by religious law in Islam, as it is in orthodox Judeo-Christianity. Yet the Muslim Sufi Shaykh Abu Hulman al-Dimeshqi reportedly approved of homosexuality for spiritual reasons. The renowned Orientalist Alan Danielou says that for Shivaite monks, who like the Khlysty renounce marriage and children, “relations between persons of the same sex are always preferable and very widely practiced.”
Danielou continues by explaining:
This connection between homosexuality and monastic and spiritual life, and the sacred view of this kind of relationship is well known in all religions. The homophobic psychosis of the Judeo-Christian world has served as a pretext for the persecution of many mystical movements that were inconveniently in conflict with the material ambitions of the churches, under the cover of an altogether arbitrary conception of morality. Sex allows the pupil-teacher relationship to achieve a fullness in which the flowering of the body leads to an ennoblement of the soul and the highest moral virtues…Sexual abstinence is a technique of Yoga, but it is worthless unless the vital energy is genuinely channelled via complex and difficult physical and mental exercises into the intellectual and spiritual evolution of the individual.8
Danielou’s observations about Shivaite ascetics may account for the reputed homosexual relations between Khlysty elders and initiates. That which is punishable by death in the old Mosaic Law and forbidden by the established Church exclusively concerns the mundane human level. Such actions can be sanctified by elevation to the sublime metaphysical level. What is forbidden in the Fallen world of the flesh — in Time — is permissible in heaven, the world of the spirit, the realm above Time. The only real union of love takes place, not between mortal beings in this material world of illusion, but on the spiritual plane, between the human soul (the lover) and the divine (the Beloved). Viewed from this position of radical asceticism, all selfish prohibitive sexual love, so obviously manifest in worldly marriage and human coupling, is actually spiritual fornication, adultery, even idolatry! As for suppression and feigned chastity, these can only constitute the worst ‘sin of pride.’
‘MAD MONK’ RASPUTIN
The extraordinary life of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin (1871-1916), a student of the Khlysty though never an initiate, is worth examining in view of this underground mystic current. A radical spiritual tradition so totally subversive of the sacrosanct institutions of society, yet so overwhelmingly compelling and liberating.The Russian “Mad Monk” Rasputin first encountered members of the Khlysty at the Orthodox monastery of Verkhoturye, where they had found refuge. From these People of God he learnt that after a period of asceticism, study, penance and prayer, it was possible to unite with the very nature of Christ.
Rasputin was probably introduced to the belief that sin, specifically what the Church deemed ‘sexual sins’, could actually be used to drive out sin. He is said to have made this doctrine the foundation of what he called “holy passionlessness,” a state of union with God attained through the sexual exhaustion that came after prolonged sexual encounters.
Rasputin reportedly said his mission was “to bring you the voice of our holy Mother Earth and to teach you the blessed secret which she passed on to me about sanctification by sin.” In its essence, this meant that the unbridled experience of sex — free of lust, desire and attachment — was a type of ‘ascetic mortification’ capable of causing the sought after ‘mystic death’ of the small self or ego. By crucifying the flesh through sexual exhaustion, the spirit united with the divine Beloved. The apparent ‘sinfulness’ of the act was abolished in the transformation of the individual. On this level mere sexual acts became transformed into a sacred ritual as the celebrant was “sanctified through sin,” free from sham moralism. Such “holy passionlessness” is also a definite technique to sacrifice the small self and destroy the pride of the individual ego. In a self-righteous, hypocritical and moralistic society, it serves to draw public opprobrium, instilling a deep humility. There is no doubt that Rasputin’s behaviour — real or imagined — shocked and outraged Russia’s bourgeoisie. But even mindful of Rasputin’s doctrine, we still cannot make too much of his alleged wild orgies, as real evidence is lacking, and most of the accusations came from his opponents.
After his time with the Khlysty, Rasputin returned to his village to announce he had undergone a spiritual rebirth. Attracting a local following, he constructed a small chapel for religious devotions. One day Rasputin had a vision of the Virgin Mary who told him to take up the life of a wandering holy man. Leaving his native village he walked some two thousand miles, completing his pilgrimage in Greece at a monastery on Mount Athos. When he eventually returned home, two years later, he was a changed man, exuding a powerful magnetism.
When Rasputin
arrived in the Russian city of St. Petersburg in 1903, he already enjoyed a
reputation as a faith healer manifesting the gifts of the Holy Spirit. He would
kneel at the beds of the sick and pray. Frequently, after laying hands on the
ill, they would recover. Grigory Rasputin, the peasant turned wandering wonder
worker, always said he was but an instrument of Christ. In the course of his
wandering Rasputin received the benediction of Father John of Kronstadt, a
living Orthodox saint. After meeting Rasputin, several bishops of the Orthodox
Church were impressed by his evident spirituality. One of his impartial
biographies notes Rasputin “had nothing whatever of the charlatan about him.
He was a religious mystic of the same type as Boehme or Saint-Martin...
throughout his life he gave away the considerable sums of money presented to him
by admirers.”9
Orthodox Archimandrite Theophan, a personal confessor to the Russian
royal family, told Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra:
Gregory Efimovich is a peasant, a man of the people. Your Majesties will do well to hear him, for it is the voice of the Russian soil which speaks through him….I know his sins, which are numberless, and most of them are heinous. But there dwells in him so deep a passion of repentance and so implicit a trust in divine pity that I would all but guarantee his eternal salvation. Every time he repents he is pure as the child washed in the waters of baptism. Manifestly, God has called him to be one of His Chosen.
In October 1905, Tsar Nicholas wrote in his diary: “Today we have made the acquaintance of Gregory, a man of God, from Tobolsk Province.” Rasputin soon became closely associated with the Russian imperial family, using his healing powers to care for the Tsar’s haemophilic son. Rasputin’s healing gifts convinced Tsarina Alexandra that he was a true holy man and the answer to her prayers. His close involvement with the Tsar earned Rasputin many enemies, who blamed the “Holy Fool” for Russia’s ills. They charged Rasputin with being a diabolical political schemer, who used his royal patronage to the unscrupulous advantage of his friends. But there is no evidence or tangible proof, as is the case with most of the rumours and scandalous accusations, today virtually synonymous with the name Rasputin.
Leonard
George recounts the strange circumstances of Rasputin’s murder:
Rasputin’s death was as remarkable as his life had been. In 1916, Prince Felix
Yusupov decided to rid Russia of the “Mad Monk.” One night, Prince Yusupov
invited Rasputin to his palace for a private party. Rasputin was served cakes
laced with cyanide and poisoned wine, but, to the astonishment of his host, he
was unaffected, and suggested that they go and invite some gypsies to the party.
Yusupov then shot Rasputin in the neck, who collapsed. When the Prince returned
a minute later with assistants to carry the body away, Rasputin was running
around the palace, trying to find an unlocked door through which to escape.
After being shot several more times, Rasputin broke through a locked door and
ran from the palace. It took another shot to bring him down. He was tied up and
then dropped into a frozen river through a hole in the ice. Later, when the body
was recovered, it was discovered that Rasputin had still been alive when he was
dropped in the river; he had managed to free one hand and had frozen while
making the sign of the cross.10
Shortly before his death, Rasputin had written to the Tsar stating that he believed he might be killed before January 1, 1917. If he were to be murdered by aristocrats — as he was — then none of the Tsar’s “children or relations will remain alive for more than two years.” Rasputin was right. The Tsar and his whole family were martyred in 1918. Another example of Rasputin’s prophetic ability. The gifted spiritual teacher Rudolf Steiner confided to a friend in 1916, prior to Rasputin’s murder, “the spirit world, the Russian Folk-Spirit, can now work in Russia through him [Rasputin] alone and through no one else.” Still today, more than eighty years after his death, there are believers who hail Rasputin as a saint, even a Christ incarnate, crucified by ‘Dark Forces’.
In 1880 the Russian Old Believers possibly numbered 13 to 14 million and at the outbreak of the Revolution some 25 million. Membership of the Skoptsy, a breakaway from the Khlysty, was estimated to have numbered at least one hundred thousand. All were products of Russia’s underground mystic tradition, a spiritual stream as alien to Western materialism and rationalism, as it is to narrow theological intellectualism and dogmatism. What may appear to a Western mind, steeped in dogmatism and cold rationalism, as a bewildering divergence of Russian spiritual speculation, is seen as a virtue by those accustomed to the history of Byzantine Christianity. As Sergius Bulgakov observes in his study The Orthodox Church: “It may be said that in the spiritual life this variety is most useful when it is greatest.”
Such an outlook comes from the Orthodox Church’s profound awareness of its origin in the apostolic Church of Jesus Christ. Bulgakov says:
Orthodoxy is not one of the historic confessions, it is the church itself, in its verity. It may even be added that, by becoming a confession, Orthodoxy fails to manifest all its force and its universal glory; it hides, one might say, in the catacombs.11
The heretical reforms of Nikon, the Old Believers argue, actually betrayed the Church’s apostolic radiance and turned it into just another Christian confession.
Slavic pagan spirituality blended smoothly with the esoteric mysteries of the Eastern Church, shaped by Gnosticism, and heavily influenced by the ageless wisdom of Greece, Persia and Egypt. Here is a definable spiritual tradition, originating in the ancient lands of Egypt, Persia, Greece and Palestine, that flourished in the ascetic mysticism of Byzantine Christianity, and when transferred to Russia took root in the pagan soul of the Eastern Slavic people. Russia’s Orthodox monasteries became its refuge, until it later emerged in the dissident sects of Old Believers, Khlysty, Skoptsy, and manifold wandering holy men, ‘Mad Monks,’ ‘Fools for God.’
These radical dissenters make up the real People of God, those who wander the world in the footsteps of the Great Dissenter Jesus the Christ and His twelve devotees. In Russia, the holy men of India and Muslim Sufi sages encountered a familiar sensitivity to the divine Beloved. The Sufi Master Inayat Khan wrote in his Confessions how on his visit to Russia he discovered “that Eastern type of discipleship which is natural to the nation.”
LOVE AND ECSTASY
The Path of the Christ is still hidden and cannot be found in the narrow confines of rationalistic science or modern theological debate. Nor can it be uncovered in a bland, literal re-reading of ancient sacred books, nor in prideful puritanism. Christ to be revealed must be first experienced in the depths of one’s inner being. The Way of the Christ is always the same. Awakening, Discipline, Enlightenment, Self-Surrender, and Union, are its universal watchwords. Only through true seeking can we find Him. This search requires us to leave behind the attachments and desires of temporal life, and transcend the illusions of material existence. Exoteric Christianity, be it Orthodox or Roman Catholic, lost sight of the True Christ. In preferring abhorrent dogmatism and power, to initiation, mystery, ritual and the God-seeking experience, they forfeited Divine Wisdom. To quote the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev: “Who believes in the force of the spirit? Do Christians?… Truth must out: the overwhelming majority of men, and among them the Christians, are materialists. Not, mark you, materialists in their doctrine, but in their life.”12
In our ‘enlightened modern age’ any discussion of authentic spirituality is seen by people as, at best, naive foolishness or, at worst, extremely dangerous madness. While there is still plenty of room in the world for base charlatanism, ignorant fundamentalism, and endless speculation about paranormal happenings, the Gnostic Tradition — radical as it is — cannot be accepted. Talk of self-mastery and a thorough going asceticism is laughed at as hopelessly “old-fashioned”. The capitalist world, boasting in its hideous technology, demands fast spiritual food and instant salvation. The United States, a disturbed hybrid of freemasonic humanism and puritanical fundamentalism, built on the wanton genocide of native spirituality, is now a veritable salvation supermarket. One selling to all buyers its shoddy wares with the promise of an easy, immediate, and therefore meaningless salvation. Is it a surprise that capitalism comfortably makes its bed with the spiritually barren bitterness known as evangelical Protestantism?
The Russian prophet, poet and martyr Nikolai Klyuev (1887-1937) incorporated Khlysty notions in his visionary poetry. Drawing on native Russian peasant imagery, he wrote in a letter to a friend:
Every day I go
into the grove — and sit there by a little chapel — and the age-old pine
tree, but an inch to the sky, I think about you…I kiss your eyes and your
heart…O, mother wilderness! paradise of the spirit…How hateful and black
seems all the so-called Civilised world and what I would give, what Golgotha I
would bear — so that America should not encroach upon the blue-feathered
dawn…upon the fairy tale hut.
Western Christianity, among whose heedless gifts to the entire planet we count
rationalism, materialism, a vain sentimental humanism, and technological
civilisation, always worshipped material force. The entire history of Western
Christendom is a struggle for political power and domination. Those heroic souls
who rose up to carry the banner of the Gnostic Christ were mercilessly hunted
down and exterminated. The True God compels nobody, allowing man the freedom of
denying Him. He desires only a free response. The Gnostic Christ preaches the
freedom of each individual to fulfil himself in accordance with his own inner
nature. Religion in the modern world serves the interest of power hungry people
who seek to impose absurd dogmas and inhuman commandments in order to perpetuate
their control.
In the late 20th century Christendom is a mere shell, but one inhabited by the most horrible Antichrist demons. Hence modern man — western man — is deceived by his apparent affluence and ‘progress’ into confusing the means of existence for its ends. He no longer thirsts after the things of the spirit. His work has no meaning except beguiling monetary gain. “The separation of thought from work,” wrote the great Russian thinker Nicolai Fedoravich Fedorov, “is the greatest of all misfortunes, incomparably worse than the separation into rich and poor.”
Vasily Rozanov
(1856-1919), the Russian philosopher whose writings explore the connections
between Christian spirituality and sexuality, declared:
Do you know, Europeans, that the Universe is already transfigured? Your
cut-and-dried categories don’t exist any more…Where is pride? Europe is
quite made of pride, Europe is proud, everything it has created comes from
pride. It’s not necessary! It’s no longer. Heaven! Give us heaven!
Mystics and Gnostics, the Templars of every age, are the vanguard of the advent of the millennial Kingdom of God, into which they already penetrate for fleeting moments. The Path of the Gnostic Christ is always adventure and danger, as opposed to drab and supremely worldly Christianity. In this modern age, the People of God belong to the past and to the future, but not to the present Dark Age of strife. Behind us lies the magnificent Golden Age. Before us a new cycle, the Age of Truth and Justice. The earthly paradise to come, what the Old Believers call Belovod’ye. The real millennial Kingdom devout Slavs knew as the mystic City of Kitezh, which like Shambhala, is concealed from mankind living in the Dark Age. But the Golden Age can only dawn after the total apocalyptic destruction of the present age of chaos.
What is the Path of the Christ in this Dark Age of confusion? It is the restatement of those ancient beliefs and practices that insist true men and women are potentially able to embody the Christ. It seeks nothing less than the attainment of the Christ by the transfiguration of the individual self, of Christ Himself, not of man-made commandments issued in his name. It compels no one and wants freedom for man to fulfil himself according to his nature. It is an underground revolt against so-called civilisation, poisonous rational thought, and stifling conformist dogmatism. It is the joyous ascetic celebration of God-seeking, for desire is bondage but joy is liberation. It is the sure certainty that only after the Apocalypse, with the final end of Antichrist oppressive civilisation, will Mother Earth be set free as we enter the City of Kitezh. It is all this, and none of this. For it is above and against TIME.
What is the relationship of the Path of the Gnostic Christ, someone may ask, to Christendom? This Path is the ageless esoteric wisdom, scorned by the worldly and materially deluded, at the heart of all the great spiritual traditions. It is Christendom that has strayed from the message of Jesus. The Path of the Gnostic Christ is about knowing/experiencing/uniting with the divine Beloved, rather than learning about God from second hand sources. In this Dark Age of Antichrist the prayers, rites, and spiritual disciplines of other times may no longer be efficacious. The only door open to us is the one of mystic God-seeking through love and ecstasy. The annihilation of the limited personal self in the most sublime union with a deeper unlimited reality. The Sufi master
Sheikh Abdullah Ansari wrote:
O Lord,
intoxicate me with the wine
Of Thy Love.
Place the chains of Thy slavery on
My feet;
Make me empty of all but Thy love,
And in it destroy me and bring me
Back to life.
The hunger Thou has awakened, culminates
In fulfillment.
FOOTNOTES
1. Mircea
Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 3
2. Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology 1
3. Sergei O. Prokofieff, The Spiritual Origins of Eastern Europe
4. Julius Evola, The Metaphysics of Sex
5. James Webb, The Occult Establishment
6. Julius Evola, ibid
7. Arthur Avalon, Shakti and Shakta
8. Alan Danielou, Fools of God
9. Colin Wilson, The Occult
10. Leonard George, The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics
11. Sergius Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church
12. Nicholas Berdyaev, Towards a New Epoch
(Source: Fellowship Forum, 1998. For further information, email lifesciencefellowship@yahoo.com)
Reproduced From Life Science Fellowship International
Russia and the Coming Age of the Spirit
One cannot rationally fathom Russia. One cannot measure it with a measuring stick. It has a special nature. One can only believe in it.
— Fyodor Tyutchev
In his famous “Letter to Soviet Leaders” penned close to twenty five years ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed that the Russian nation has suffered more than any other in the twentieth century. Indeed, this century could be said to be the time of Russia’s ‘Golgotha’. A hundred years of incredible human suffering and national sacrifice claimed millions of Russian lives. Within the first five decades of this century the Apocalyptic Horseman of Famine and War ravaged the vast Russian land. Archaic landmarks swept aside and old values overturned only to be replaced by radical new ways which themselves were soon found wanting. Spectacular material triumphs accomplished at the cost of freedom and paid for in human blood.
The collapse of the Soviet super power did not deliver Russia from her agonies. The end of communist rule subjected Russia to the worst excesses of the capitalist market. Financial chaos, mafia banditry and the corruption of political life quickly replaced the stagnation and certainties of a once great authoritarian state.
Back in the nineteenth century the Russian political thinker Alexander Herzen concluded “disorder saves Russia.” For despite all the external turmoil and pain, the unchanging, eternal essence of the Russian national soul remains. This essence or Idea, which owes nothing to politicians or earthly power, is preserved by humility, a craving for Truth, centuries of God-seeking and suffering.
The chief festival of Russian Orthodoxy is the Festival of Easter. Christianity is interpreted as above all the religion of Resurrection. Suffering is redemptive. Jesus suffered on the Cross before being resurrected. According to Ancient Wisdom long trials and suffering are inevitable for the pilgrim on the path of spiritual enlightenment, since they lead to purification. On the national level suffering can be said to cleanse society in preparation for collective renewal. There is a purpose, a transcendent meaning in all the trials and tragedies of earthly existence.
Dostoyevsky, Golden Age Prophet
God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth…and they germinated….But that which grows lives and enjoys vitality only through its sense of contact with other mysterious worlds….Much on earth is hidden from us, but in exchange we have been given a secret and hidden sense of our living bond with another world.…
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky1
The “theme of redemption through suffering,” observes the American scholar Tim McDaniel, “is absolutely fundamental to Russian culture, and central to a great many views of Russian distinctiveness.”2 For the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), “the main and most fundamental spiritual quest of the Russian people is their craving for suffering.” Dostoyevsky called the Russian nation an “extraordinary phenomenon,” with a unique national character unlike any European people. “The character of the Russian people,” said Dostoyevsky, is:
so different from that of all other contemporary European nations, that up until now the Europeans have not succeeded in understanding it – on the contrary, they have completely misunderstood it. Europe is losing her universality and the Christian links between people are losing their power. Contrary to Europe, the highly synthetic ability of panreconciliation, of panhumanism, is more and more strong among the Russians. A Russian does not have European awkwardness, impenetrability, inflexibility. He can come to terms with everybody…he has an instinct of panhumanism.
Panhumanism arrived at through love and suffering is the only antidote to Western egoism and materialism. In the West, Dostoyevsky noted, “all is now strife and logic,” driven on by “the dream of Rothschild,” the soulless pursuit of “money as the highest virtue and human obligation.”
By contrast “the Russian vocation,” Dostoyevsky believed, “is to wait until European civilization expires in order to take its ideals and goals and to elevate them to a panhuman meaning.” Shortly before his death, he prophesied, “A new Russia will arise which in due time will regenerate and resurrect the old one and will show the latter the road which she has to follow.” “To be a real Russian,” he told a breathless Moscow audience in 1880, “means to become the brother of everyone, to become All-Man….It means finding an outlet for the anguish of Europe in the All-Human and All-Uniting Russian soul.” Russian panhumanism is a new world idea heralding the way toward a higher stage of civilisation, in which conflicts would be resolved by creating a “concert of all nations in the Gospel of Christ.” Dostoyevsky wrote:
The sun appeared in the East, and it is from the East that the new day begins for mankind. When the sun is shining in its full glory, then it will be understood what the real ‘interests of civilization’ are.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a true prophet of the return of the lost Golden Age. His writings take us “from the real to the more real,” as he searches for the meaning of life in the depths of human experience. He placed his hope for the future not in the ‘anthills’ of the capitalist West, but in a new Golden Age of “brotherly communality…. the voluntary, totally conscious sacrifice of oneself in the interests of all made under no sort of compulsion.” This is Russia’s destiny. Her world mission. “Nations are moved”, we read in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, “by a force whose origin is unknown and inexplicable. This…is what philosophers call the aesthetic or moral principle; I call it simply the quest for God.”
European occultists esteemed Dostoyevsky as an initiate of esoteric wisdom and some modern authors speculate about his membership in a secret brotherhood. His writings display the deep influence of a Christian mysticism infused by Gnosticism and we know through out his life he communicated with Russian religious dissidents such as the Old Believers. “The creative work of Dostoyevsky is eschatological through and through,” said the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. “It is interested only in the ultimate, only in what is orientated to the end…His prophetic art consists in the fact that he revealed the volcanic ground of the spirit; he described the inner revolution of the spirit…It is precisely in Dostoyevsky that the Russian messianic consciousness makes itself most keenly felt….It is to him that the words ‘The Russian people is a God-bearing people’ belong.”3
The Third Kingdom
Everything visible to us
Is only a flash, only a shadow
From what cannot be seen
by the eye.
— Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900)
Like Dostoyevsky the gifted Russian poetess Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) longed for the dawn of the Golden Age when the earth would unite with Heaven into one blissful Kingdom. And like Dostoyevsky Gippius saw the tragedy of human existence in man’s alienation from the spiritual world and the superficiality of his mere faith in God. Much of her writings express the trial of the spirit in its attempts to free itself from material reality and to fly heavenward.
Gippius and her husband the celebrated Russian novelist and critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1866-1941) distinguish three phases in the history of humanity and its future. These phases represent three different realms: the realm of God the Father, the Creator – the realm of the Old Testament; the realm of God the Son, Jesus Christ – the realm of the New Testament, the present phase which is now closing; and the realm of the Holy Spirit, Divine Sophia (Wisdom) – the era of the Third Testament, which is now dawning, gradually disclosing its message to humanity. The Kingdom of the Old Testament revealed divine power and authority as truth; the Kingdom of the New Testament reveals truth as love; and the Kingdom of the Third Testament will reveal love as inner freedom.
Just
as the previous Kingdoms symbolise a change in human consciousness, so the final
Kingdom of the Third Testament is to be ushered in by a new religious
consciousness, the genesis of a New Humanity. The Third Testament will resolve
all present antitheses – sex and asceticism, individualism and society,
slavery and freedom, atheism and religiosity, hatred and love. The enigma of
Earth and Heaven, the flesh and the spirit, will be solved in the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit will redeem the world, giving humanity a new life in peace,
harmony, and love. The Three in One will be realised, and Spiritual Christianity
– long ago driven underground – will be brought into the open. God the
Father and God the Son will be synthesised by the Holy Spirit, Divine Wisdom.
The emphasis the Merezhkovsky’s placed on the Holy Spirit, reminds us of
Dostoyevsky’s thought:
The Holy Spirit is a direct conception of beauty, a prophetic consciousness of harmony and hence a steadfast striving toward it.
In propagating their ‘Cause of the Three in One’ Gippius and Merezhkovsky hoped for a religious revolution, a spiritual metamorphosis of man to prepare him for the Third Kingdom. According to Gippius the aim of all universal-historical development is the end of humanity and the world in their present forms through the Apocalypse. Only the coming of Christ will unite humanity in brotherly love and harmony as one living family. At this point in the spiritual evolution of mankind the apocalyptical Church will be established, not as a temple, but as a new experience of God in human consciousness and in the human soul.
Gippius
and Merezhkovsky gave expression to the messianic idea at the heart of Russian
life. In the process they drew on the eschatological doctrines popular among
Russian Gnostics and religious sectarians. From earliest times Russian thought
was saturated with a particular Gnostic dualism characterised by a constant
struggle between the evil powers which organise the earth (and earthly life),
and the forces of good which seek for the City of Truth and Justice to come.
Gippius and Merezhkovsky travelled deep into Russia beyond the Volga river, to
visit Russian mystics in their secluded monasteries. On the road to Kerzhenets,
near the legendary invisible city of Kitezh, they met with representatives of
diverse mystical sects. Merezhkovsky maintained a correspondence with some of
these Russian Gnostics and Gippius penned a story describing, with a great deal
of inside knowledge, the secret rites of the Gnostic Khlysty community.
The Khlysty, know as “God’s people,” were heirs of the Bogomils and early Gnostic Christians. Savagely persecuted by the official Orthodox Church they preserved their teachings in secret. They met not in a church but in an isolated meeting place usually known as “Jerusalem” or “Mount Zion.” They conducted not a solemn service but a “rejoicing.” They comprised not a congregation but an “Ark,” and were led not by a priest but by a “pilot” for the voyage from the material to the spiritual world – into the seventh heaven where men could rediscover their lost divinity. The means of ascent lay partly in the “alchemy of speech” – spiritual songs and chants which produced a state of ecstasy, a sense of liberation from the material world. The Khlysty were just one of numerous Spiritual Christian communities owing their allegiance, not to the Russian Empire or official Church, but to the Third Kingdom. The most important of their commandments being “Believe in the Holy Spirit.”
In seeking the freedom of the spirit, the divine spark within, the Khlysty rejected all earthly laws and institutions. A Spiritual Christian guided by the Holy Spirit did not need to obey any external law. The official report of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1900 recognised the Khlysty as the most influential of all sects. A prominent church missionary reported in 1915 that Khlysty had invaded all Russia and that there was no province where the sect did not exist in one form or another.
Spiritual Revolution
After the Bolshevic Revolution, many people who once had vested their hopes in religion and magic turned to science and technology instead. The Bolsheviks adapted occult ideas, symbols, and techniques to political propaganda. Occult and quasi-occult ideas nourished early Soviet utopianism, pervaded literature and the arts, and contributed to the Lenin cult.4
Zinaida Gippius and Dmitry Merezhkovsky believed the Bolshevic Revolution to be a diabolical perversion of the spiritual influences of the incoming Third Age. A monstrous and catastrophic parody of the Kingdom of the Spirit. After fleeing Russia Merezhkovsky explored the links between the Russian people and the so-called lost tribes of Israel. He saw Russia’s catastrophic plight foreshadowed in the Biblical prophecies of the dispersed Israelites and condemned Bolshevism as Antichrist.
Other Russian mystics and religious dissidents welcomed the Bolshevic Revolution as a necessary part in Russia’s fulfilment of the divine plan. The very fact that the Revolution had taken place in Russia was a striking demonstration of Russia’s unique historical mission. Prior to the First World War the “holy fool” Marfa Medvensky, whose prophetic utterances enjoyed wide popular support, had passed a “verdict of death on all external manifestations of religion, all sacraments, all ritual, all human institutions.” The October 1917 communist takeover brought an end to the cruel institutions of Church and Empire that had long persecuted Russia’s Spiritual Christians.
Nikolai
The republic is for the mind, Mother Russia is for the heart….The republic is for the mind, Kitezh-city is for the heart.
Alexander
Blok (1880-1921), the greatest Russian poet at the beginning of the twentieth
century and contemporary of the Merezhkovskys, wrote in 1918, “I see before me
Russia, that Russia which great writers saw in their terrifying prophetic
dreams. I see that Petersburg which Dostoyevsky saw, that Russia which Gogol
called a speeding troika…Russia is destined to suffer the pains of humiliation
and division. But she will emerge from these humiliations reborn and great in a
new way.” With inner vision he predicted, “Russia is a big ship that is
destined to make a great voyage.”
Drawing inspiration from Dostoyevsky and the Russian mystic tradition, Blok discerned in Bolshevism the first rays of a coming national renaissance. His poem “The Twelve” captured the spiritual dimension beyond the external chaos of the Revolution. At the end of the poem the Christ appears before the Bolshevic Red Army soldiers, symbolising Russia’s eventual spiritual destiny.
The communist revolution and the Soviet experiment can be understood as the momentous birth pangs of the Third Age. The manifestation on the earth plane of a spiritual transition from one era to the next. The working out in world history of a stage in the grand cosmic battle. In the Bolshevic Revolution the old First Kingdom era ideas of power and authority vied with the fading Second Kingdom demand for absolute service and equality. Russia in giving expression to all these elements revealed an innate striving toward the Third Kingdom. But the crucial element lacking was spiritual freedom. Freedom for the inner man, the realisation of the God within.
The Russian Idea at the eternal heart of Russian life and culture is the idea of community and the brotherhood of man. It is apocalyptic and messianic, heralding the new era of the Holy Spirit, an era of love, panhumanism and inner freedom. Secular and rational Western European civilisation mistook the freedom to exploit and consume, for the real freedom of the spirit. A secular civilisation exhibiting an arrogant need to cast aside everything not deemed materially useful, would do well to heed the Russian Idea. In the words of Nikolai Berdyaev:
The Russian people, in accordance with its eternal Idea, has no love for the ordering of this earthly city and struggles towards a city that is to come, towards the new Jerusalem….The spirit of community and the brotherhood of mankind are a necessity for the new Jerusalem, and for the attainment of these it is still endeavoring to have the experience of an era of the Holy Spirit, in which there will be a new revelation about society. For this the way is being prepared in Russia.5
At the end of this century we see the Three Kingdoms expressed in three distinct human mentalities. For the people of the First Kingdom, God is principally a stern school master, their thinking directed to power and authority. They seek conformity to external law and order. Their God requires worship and obedience, demanding “Thou shalt not.” The mentality of the Second Kingdom is typically one of service and sharing. God comes down to humanity in the person of Jesus the Christ and worshipped in acts of service to humanity. Even contemporary political and social events display the tensions between these two modes of consciousness. In the incoming Third Kingdom human beings look for God within themselves. All the opposites and struggles which so characterise the first two eras are reconciled. The Third Age is one of brotherly communality and the reign of the Holy Spirit, an era of love and freedom. The Age of the Spirit which inspired Dostoyevsky as it did all seekers of truth throughout history.
When Russia follows principles developed by other peoples and alien to the Russian Idea she inevitably suffers pain and bondage, unable to realise her spiritual destiny as harbinger of the Age of the Spirit. Russia’s mission is marvellous, but it exists only potentially. Both Soviet Russia and the post communist capitalist Russia failed to unleash the power of the spirit.
In the third millennium of the Christian era, crucified Russia will come down from the Cross to which it has been nailed and build a bright new future for itself and for others. On that day Mother Russia will give birth to new paths, and not repeat the errors of the West, which has concentrated all its powers on building the outer man and has completely forgotten about edifying the inner man. In this bloody century providence prepared Russia, in the crucible of suffering, for a better future. From Russia will come a third culture that is different and superior to materialist Marxism and capitalist liberalism. Just as at the beginning of this century Russian teachers planted the seeds of the New Age movement (see accompanying article), so in the next century from Russia will emerge the Third Testament, the dawn of the Third Era, the Age of the Spirit.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke shared German philosopher Nietzsche’s conviction that although God had died in the West, he continued to live in Russia. With the profound insight of a poet-prophet he wrote:
If I had come on this earth as a prophet, I would preach all my life that Russia was the chosen land over which lies God’s massive sculptor’s hand as though in a provident delaying action: everything it needs is to come to this land, but the fulfilment of its destiny is to be slower and clearer.
Footnotes
1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov
2. Tim McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea
3. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea
4. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, edited by Bernice Glatzner Rosenthal
5. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea
Pictures added by The Gnostic Liberation Front
