The Religious Spirit of the Slavs | Page 6

the Anglicans, but we conceive it rather as dramatic.

SLAV ORTHODOXY IS NOT SELF-SUFFICIENT.
We are quite conscious that our religion is not solely Christ's work. Every drop of blood of a Christian martyr is a stone in the work. Every suffering man with heroic Christian hopes, and every dying human being with optimistic Christian belief is a collaborator of Christ, or is a founder of our Church. The Church is not at all solely Christ's work, she is the collective work of many and many millions who, in the name of Christ, decisively took part in this mystic race of earthly life. That is just what Christ wanted and prophesied. That is why He washed the feet of His disciples.
The work of Tolstoi is the work of a man; Slav Orthodoxy is the work of the generations. Orthodoxy was first defined by the Christian Jews and Greeks during the first eight hundred years. During the other thousand years Orthodoxy was enriched by the Slav Bible, i.e., by Slav religious experiences, by Slav martyrs, saints, heroes, by Slav sins and repentances, by Slav struggles and convulsions for Christ. It is a very large record, a very large Bible indeed, a wonderful drama, quite new, fresh, original, although in old forms and words, and signs. Still Slav Orthodoxy is not self-sufficient. She would become by human inertia self-sufficient, unless Providence sent her punishment from time to time. Tolstoi was for Orthodoxy a punishment. He was like a whirlwind which pulls down many things but at the same time purifies the unhealthy air. He was not at all a demon, but a man sent by God to help our Church; and he helped very much indeed--as all the sects and critics of Christianity from the beginning have helped the Christian cause, ridiculing and exposing the Christian Paganism manifested in ecclesiastical pride, in superstitions, prejudices, intolerance, etc.
What are the present needs of Slav Orthodoxy? Oh, her needs are great, her thirst is immense. She does not need so much what Tolstoi proposed for her, or what Harnack could give her, neither does she thirst after the stricter and clearer juristic definitions, nor after a "sweet reasonableness," as Matthew Arnold expressed Christ's being, a new theology or a new worship.
She needs more Christian dramas blended in one. She needs more of Christ on earth, more votes for Christ, all the votes for Christ instead of dividing them between Olympus and Golgotha. She needs to be united with all other Churches in one Christ-like body and spirit, in order that all the pieces of a broken mirror may be recomposed and that Christ could see in it His whole face. She is thirsty for more stigmata, more suffering, more sins. Yes, she is thirsty for more sins, I say, and more virtues; she likes to have all the sins and all the virtues of the world confessed and recognised as the common burden and common good. She is thirsty for a communion of sins and virtues among men, she is thirsty to call you brothers. She is thirsty to cry in exaltation to every man under the sun: "Poor child, give me just your sins (you don't need them) and I will give you my virtues, in order that I may be ashamed of your sins and you may be proud of my virtues."
For centuries Slav Orthodoxy seemed to the Western world like an immobile tortoise with a multi-coloured shell and with no great probability of its being inhabited by a living being. The outside world looked at this multi-coloured, hard and unchangeable shell, sometimes with love, sometimes with horror--always with an intense curiosity and almost always with a doubt that there could be any living thing in it. I will try to show you that there was and still is a living being contained therein, with many more movements, dissatisfactions, convulsions, longings and sufferings than it seems possible could exist.
II
SLAV REVOLUTIONARY CATHOLICISM
A FAR AIM AND A NARROW WAY.
If Providence bestows on the English Church only once in every half century a man like Bishop Westcott, this Church, I think, can be sure of a solid and sound longevity. Well, this Bishop Westcott spoke once enthusiastically of "the noble catholicity which is the glory of the English Church." My intention in this lecture is to describe to you an island in the Roman Catholic Church among the Slavs, which island is distinguished by a noble catholicity. "I believe in the holy catholic apostolic church." This sentence that you repeat in London, as do the Roman Catholics in Rome, and we Orthodox in Moscow, has always two meanings, a sectarian and a universal, or a narrow one and a sublime one. The first meaning belongs to the people who imagine Christ standing at the boundary of their Church,