Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak [228]
“I’d say that a human being is made up of two parts. Of God and work. The development of the human spirit breaks down into separate works of enormous duration. They were realized in the course of generations and followed one after the other. Egypt was such a work, Greece was such a work, the biblical prophets’ knowledge of God was such a work. Such a work—the latest in time, not yet supplanted by anything else, performed by the entire inspiration of our time—is Christianity.
“In order to present to you in all its freshness and unexpectedness, not as you yourself know and are used to it, but more simply, more directly, what it brought that was new and unprecedented, I’ll analyze several fragments of liturgical texts with you, very few and brief ones.
“Most hymns are formed by juxtaposing images from the Old and New Testaments. Instances from the old world—the burning bush, the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the youths in the fiery furnace, Jonah in the belly of the whale, and so on—are compared with instances from the new, for example, the Mother of God’s conception and the Resurrection of Christ.
“In this frequent, almost constant matching, the oldness of the old, the newness of the new, and their difference appear with particular distinctness.
“In a whole multitude of verses, the virgin motherhood of Mary is compared with the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews. For instance, in the verses of ‘In the Red Sea, a type of the virgin bride was figured’ it is said: ‘After Israel’s passage, the sea remained impassable; after Emmanuel’s birth the undefiled one remained intact.’7 In other words, the waters of the sea closed after the crossing of Israel, and the Virgin remained intact after giving birth to the Lord. What sort of incidents are made parallel here? Both events are supernatural, both are equally recognized as miracles. In what did these two different times, the ancient, primitive time and the new, post-Roman time, which was far more advanced, see a miracle?
“In the one case, by the command of the people’s leader, the patriarch Moses, and by the swinging of his magic rod, the sea opens up, lets a whole nation pass across it, a countless multitude, hundreds of thousands, and when the last one has crossed, closes again, and covers and drowns the pursuing Egyptians. A spectacle in the ancient spirit, the elements obedient to the magician’s voice, the great thronging multitudes, like Roman armies on the march, the people and their leader, things visible and invisible, stunning.
“In the other case, a maiden—an ordinary thing, the ancient world wouldn’t have paid attention to it—secretly and quietly gives life to a child, brings life into the world, the miracle of life, the life of all, He who is ‘the Life of all,’ as he was later called. Her childbirth is unlawful not only from the point of view of the scribes, being outside wedlock. It also contradicts the laws of nature. The maiden gives birth not by force of necessity, but by miracle, by inspiration. It is that very inspiration upon which the Gospel, by opposing the exception to the rule and the feast to the everyday, wants to build a life contrary to all constraint.
“What an enormously significant change! How is it that for heaven (because it is in the eyes of heaven that this must be evaluated, before the face of heaven, in the sacred framework of uniqueness in which it is all accomplished)—how is it that for heaven a private human circumstance, negligible from the point of view of antiquity, became equivalent to the migration of an entire people?
“Something shifted in the world. Rome ended, the power of numbers, the necessity, imposed by arms, of living en masse, as a whole population. Leaders and nations became things of the past.
“The person, the preaching of freedom came to supplant them. An individual human life became God’s story, filling the space of the universe with its content. As it’s said in one of the hymns of the Annunciation, Adam wanted to become God and made a mistake and did