A CONFESSION [30]
arguments and contradictions, and tried to explain as reasonably as
possible the Church statements I encountered.
When fulfilling the rites of the Church I humbled my reason
and submitted to the tradition possessed by all humanity. I united
myself with my forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I
loved. They and all my predecessors believed and lived, and they
produced me. I united myself also with the missions of the common
people whom I respected. Moveover, those actions had nothing bad
in themselves ("bad" I considered the indulgence of one's desires).
When rising early for Church services I knew I was doing well, if
only because I was sacrificing my bodily ease to humble my mental
pride, for the sake of union with my ancestors and contemporaries,
and for the sake of finding the meaning of life. It was the same
with my preparations to receive Communion, and with the daily
reading of prayers with genuflections, and also with the observance
of all the fasts. However insignificant these sacrifices might be
I made them for the sake of something good. I fasted, prepared for
Communion, and observed the fixed hours of prayer at home and in
church. During Church service I attended to every word, and gave
them a meaning whenever I could. In the Mass the most important
words for me were: "Let us love one another in conformity!" The
further words, "In unity we believe in the Father, the Son, and
Holy Ghost", I passed by, because I could not understand them.
XIV
In was then so necessary for me to believe in order to live
that I unconsciously concealed from myself the contradictions and
obscurities of theology. but this reading of meanings into the
rites had its limits. If the chief words in the prayer for the
Emperor became more and more clear to me, if I found some
explanation for the words "and remembering our Sovereign Most-Holy
Mother of God and all the Saints, ourselves and one another, we
give our whole life to Christ our God", if I explained to myself
the frequent repetition of prayers for the Tsar and his relations
by the fact that they are more exposed to temptations than other
people and therefore are more in need of being prayed for -- the
prayers about subduing our enemies and evil under our feet (even if
one tried to say that *sin* was the enemy prayed against), these
and other prayers, such as the "cherubic song" and the whole
sacrament of oblation, or "the chosen Warriors", etc. -- quite two-
thirds of all the services -- either remained completely
incomprehensible or, when I forced an explanation into them, made
me feel that I was lying, thereby quite destroying my relation to
God and depriving me of all possibility of belief.
I felt the same about the celebration of the chief holidays.
To remember the Sabbath, that is to devote one day to God, was
something I could understand. But the chief holiday was in
commemoration of the Resurrection, the reality of which I could not
picture to myself or understand. And that name of "Resurrection"
was also given the weekly holiday. [Footnote: In Russia Sunday
was called Resurrection-day. -- A. M.] And on those days the
Sacrament of the Eucharist was administered, which was quite
unintelligible to me. The rest of the twelve great holidays,
except Christmas, commemorated miracles -- the things I tried not
to think about in order not to deny: the Ascension, Pentecost,
Epiphany, the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin, etc.
At the celebration of these holidays, feeling that importance was
being attributed to the very things that to me presented a negative
importance, I either devised tranquillizing explanations or shut my
eyes in order not to see what tempted me.
Most of all this happened to me when taking part in the most
usual Sacraments, which are considered the most important: baptism
and communion. There I encountered not incomprehensible but fully
comprehensible doings: doings which seemed to me to lead