A CONFESSION [29]
then asked myself what meaning those propositions had and,
convinced that they had none, I rejected them. Now on the contrary
I knew firmly that my life otherwise has, and can have, no meaning,
and the articles of faith were far from presenting themselves to me
as unnecessary -- on the contrary I had been led by indubitable
experience to the conviction that only these propositions presented
by faith give life a meaning. formerly I looked on them as on some
quite unnecessary gibberish, but now, if I did not understand them,
I yet knew that they had a meaning, and I said to myself that I
must learn to understand them.
I argued as follows, telling myself that the knowledge of
faith flows, like all humanity with its reason, from a mysterious
source. That source is God, the origin both of the human body and
the human reason. As my body has descended to me from God, so also
has my reason and my understanding of life, and consequently the
various stages of the development of that understanding of life
cannot be false. All that people sincerely believe in must be
true; it may be differently expressed but it cannot be a lie, and
therefore if it presents itself to me as a lie, that only means
that I have not understood it. Furthermore I said to myself, the
essence of every faith consists in its giving life a meaning which
death does not destroy. Naturally for a faith to be able to reply
to the questions of a king dying in luxury, of an old slave
tormented by overwork, of an unreasoning child, of a wise old man,
of a half-witted old woman, of a young and happy wife, of a youth
tormented by passions, of all people in the most varied conditions
of life and education -- if there is one reply to the one eternal
question of life: "Why do I live and what will result from my
life?" -- the reply, though one in its essence, must be endlessly
varied in its presentation; and the more it is one, the more true
and profound it is, the more strange and deformed must it naturally
appear in its attempted expression, conformably to the education
and position of each person. But this argument, justifying in my
eyes the queerness of much on the ritual side of religion, did not
suffice to allow me in the one great affair of life -- religion --
to do things which seemed to me questionable. With all my soul I
wished to be in a position to mingle with the people, fulfilling
the ritual side of their religion; but I could not do it. I felt
that I should lie to myself and mock at what was sacred to me, were
I to do so. At this point, however, our new Russian theological
writers came to my rescue.
According to the explanation these theologians gave, the
fundamental dogma of our faith is the infallibility of the Church.
From the admission of that dogma follows inevitably the truth of
all that is professed by the Church. The Church as an assembly of
true believers united by love and therefore possessed of true
knowledge became the basis of my belief. I told myself that divine
truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual; it is revealed
only to the whole assembly of people united by love. To attain
truth one must not separate, and in order not to separate one must
love and must endure things one may not agree with.
Truth reveals itself to love, and if you do not submit to the
rites of the Church you transgress against love; and by
transgressing against love you deprive yourself of the possibility
of recognizing the truth. I did not then see the sophistry
contained in this argument. I did not see that union in love may
give the greatest love, but certainly cannot give us divine truth
expressed in the definite words of the Nicene Creed. I also did
not perceive that love cannot make a certain expression of truth an
obligatory condition of union. I did not then see these mistakes
in the argument and thanks to it was able to accept and perform all
the rites of the Orthodox Church without understanding most of
them. I then tried with all strength of my soul