Eschatology is a religious doctrine about the ultimate destiny of mankind and the world, about what will happen at the end of time. It is well known that our troubled age, having mastered the secret of nuclear self-destruction, has often been on the verge of bringing the entire history of the human race to a catastrophic end. The uneasy fears and presentiments that have taken root in this soil have sometimes been given religious interpretations of an eschatological color. It is said that the end of the world is now inevitable, that our nuclear arsenals have become weapons of punishment in the hands of an angry God. Mankind must pay for its sins, for its declaration of independence, for the reckless challenge it has thrown down to God by remaking the world to its own specifications through science and technology.
Russia has its own long tradition of eschatological prophecies. Some Russian (and like-minded Western) thinkers have declared that “the end of the world will begin with Russia,” where the “abomination of desolation” will ascend the throne. This is in effect the view of the so-called “Steppies.” What they love about Russia is the emptiness of the steppe. For them it’s as if Russia has no need to fear the end, for she herself is already the end of everything—which means, according to them, the site of God’s presence. “Prepare ye a way for the Lord in the wilderness,” they cry, appealing to the prophet Isaiah in support of their belief in the holiness of the empty steppe. Their rites and rituals are in the literal sense acts of draining off some vacuum into the void, and thus can hardly be subjected to content-analysis. The essence of the Steppie doctrine is simply “nothing.”
One of the most sinister and monstrous developments in religious thought is Sinnerism, which makes the “highest” moral conceptions into the basis of a right to commit sins, including murder. God, they say, allows men to break all the commandments and commit their souls to the torments of hell—if they do it out of love for humanity. This doctrine has a very complex and murky history, including the notion of a “Third Covenant” (which in fact turns out to have two parts: the “Spiritual Covenant” and the “Infernal Covenant”). Without going into all the details, interesting though they may be for specialists, one must point out how monstrously this doctrine contradicts the simple rules of human morality. And it is futile for the ideologues of Sinnerism—who insist that faith in God can justify and even glorify the most heinous crimes against humanity—to appeal to the code of honor of the Russian revolutionaries: the morality of our society has long since condemned the kind of Nechaevism that justified bloody means of achieving ideal ends.
All in all, it is crucial to identify those genuine problems and anxieties of our times that foster eschatological ideas. Whenever someone says that “the end” has “already” come, or that it is “still” possible to be “saved,” we must point out that the life and death of mankind is in our own hands. The only counterweight to the threat of civilization’s self-annihilation is its own will to self-preservation.
Steppies
This is one of the least-studied faiths. Its representatives are sometimes called Void- Worshipers, Holy-Earthniks, Cosanostrans, Plain People, and Latitudinarians. These names may refer to various still-unknown divisions within Steppiedom itself. On some points, Steppie doctrine overlaps with the Red Horde or Orientism.
From the Steppies’ point of view, the atheism that triumphed in post- Revolutionary Russia is a significant step in the direction of those eastern forms of religiosity that revere Nothing. The collapse of Orthodoxy laid the foundations for a new universal religion occupying an intermediate position between eastern and western or “negative” and “positive” forms of religiosity, between “world negation” and “world affirmation”.
Russian Marxism is akin to Buddhism in its atheistic tendency. . . . But the essential difference is that the Russian nirvana is sought within life itself, and constructed from the materials of nature and society. The site of salvation, where the painted veils of Maya are to be stripped away, is located in physical space and historical time. Yet it is not fused with time but raised above time, as the bright kingdom of Superhistory (or “Authentic History”). Likewise, the earthly nirvana cannot be the sum or juxtaposition of several different places with their individual landscapes and climates; it must be one single, continuous place, geographically accessible and defined, but endowed with the boundlessness of the Absolute in its eternal self-identity. This placement of nirvana within time and space (rejected by Buddhism itself) leads to specifically “plane” or “latitudinal” modes of religious existence. The reign of one deathless leader becomes the Chronos of this “plane” state of the world, and the extension of one endless plain becomes its Topos. (“Buddhomarxism: Research Materials”)
The Steppies regard the “innate instinct” of Emptiness as the specific form of Russian religiosity, not yet consciously recognized and only now emerging from beneath the flotsam of alien religions introduced from the West. But they interpret Emptiness not as a simple Nothingness or “idle negation,” but as an indiscriminate Allness, where everything is dissolved in everything else and thus ceases to be anything in particular.
Here, incidentally, lies the source of the Steppies’ quarrel with the Thingwrights. Thingwrights claim that “nothing can exist without being something,” to which the Steppies reply, “nothing can exist without being everything” (I.K., “The Antinomies of Emptiness”).
The Steppies use the term “breadth” for a state of being in which nothing is distinguishable from anything else:
...a quiet, healthy existence in the mode of breadth. Breadth is God’s gift to man. According to an ancient tradition, in the beginning the world consisted only of heights and depths, mountains and seas. When man appeared, he didn’t know where to live, so he prayed: “Where are You, Lord? I want to be with You.”And God answered him: “I shall put My heights before you and I shall spread My depths before you, for you are My true image and My beloved child; and I will keep no secrets from you, just as you will keep no secrets from Me.” And behold, God made Eden, the first level place on the earth, and there He settled the man, who began to rule over the earth, which was completely open before him. . . . But when he closed his heart against God, the earth became closed to him again; again the depths were ruptured and the mountains loomed up....
And yet, when God expelled man from paradise, He left him a place for his work on the earth. Although the plain wafts sadness and melancholy over man, it reminds him of his covenant with God: this is the earth he was given to rule over. And the greatest plain was given to the greatest people, the people chosen to sanctify the breadth of the earth. (G.Ya., “Breadth and Height in Early Eschatological Traditions”)
Remember: you live on the plain, and lo, the plain lives in you. “Plain” is the name of the condition of a man who has attained the point of we in his soul. The greatest wisdom lies in being plane, like the space stretching out all around you. One and the same endless plain—the plane on which we meet each other—extends through all souls. He who goes higher or lower will never meet his brother. If you raise yourself a mountain, you will block your neighbor’s light; if you descend into a canyon, you yourself will be beyond the reach of light. . . . Look at the earth, how it stretches out around you for thousands of miles! Nature herself has given it to you as a model. Make yourself like this plain: ever the same, neither rising up in joy nor sinking down in sadness, neither mounting higher nor falling lower. Truth lies in this breadth where everyone meets everyone else; it is not in the heights and depths to which individuals soar up and crash down. Breadth unites, while height and depth separate. . . . Breadth is the openness of God’s heart, which collects us, all His children, into a single we. He who hearkens to the Lord and answers “we” to His “I” has attained the spiritual plane in his own heart....
The chief feature of each thing is its breadth. The ideal world has neither depths nor heights; there, nothing is hidden from man. On the plain, every place is visible from every other place; voices carry clearly, each audible to each. This is the highest degree of development, the ultimate point in the evolution of worlds, where everything internal becomes external. Everything now hidden on peaks and in abysses will emerge from the darkness of original sin, cast off the stamp of its shameful secret, return to its full and mighty breadth, and become steppe. Everything has its own inner steppe; but what strength it takes to traverse it from end to end, to become level with everything! . . . Will you find the steppe-trekker within yourself, will you try out the breadth and measure of things with your stride?...(“The Book of Plains and Steppes”)
The Steppies believe there is a connection between breadth and the phenomenon of Russian drunkenness. The letter has never yet been adequately studied; no one has yet discovered a form of sobriety comprehensive enough to compete with it.
Drunkenness is the eschatological sickness of the Russian soul, thirsting after a new earth and a new heaven. All around us we see “the Promised Breadth,” as the poet put it, “which eclipses even the brightest light” (I.Z.).... This nation will be cured of its drunkenness only when it finds something in reality itself to answer its broadest spiritual needs. The European forms of civilization, too narrow, specialized, “particular,” offer no answer to these boundless needs; but intoxication somehow satisfies them by washing away all boundaries. Of course, drunkenness is an illness. The problem is to find a kind of health that the soul would still desire after tasting the unfathomable longing of the steppe.... What is needed are forms of expansiveness so sober that no room is left for drunkenness. (Yu.K., “The Joy of Rus”)
Among possible versions of the future “divined” by the Steppies is a return on the superhistorical level to the nomadic life of prehistoric times.
Speed is one of the few authentic forms of sober expansiveness. In moving from one place to another, a man senses that his own boundlessness lies not somewhere beyond the edge of reality but within reality itself. . . . The Russia of the future will be a society of “runners”; there, no one will be where he was the day before. In Old Russian times there was such a sect, whose members were always on the run—from the authorities, from settled people, from themselves. Of course, in our times only an economically prosperous society can allow its members to be in constant motion. But our civilization’s actual lines of development—the accelerating growth of the means of transportation and communication—point to the likelihood of such a future....
A man on the move does not drink; he is already intoxicated by speed itself. The lower, alcoholic form of drunkenness is crowded out by the higher, apocalyptic form. Where the Hindu communes with emptiness through contemplation, stillness, seclusion, the Russian does it through a maximum kick of speed. He believes in the emptiness revealed to him on all sides, for speed is the highest revelation of this emptiness, sucking him in like a tornado but keeping him whole as it carries him further and further away. He burns up space and time in his soul, while hovering about the motionless point of the Always- Here. Speed has no boundaries, nothing beyond. Everything is here, everything is now. A horse or a motorcycle is all you need to burn up this heap of importunate, oppressive corporeality, to fly off into eternity while still remaining in time. In the words of the early Steppie poet V.B.1:
“Are you moving, my stallion, or standing in place?” Wordless, he soars into infinite space.
The answerless silence, the boundless inane Mirror eternity as in a pane.
This poem, entitled “Steppe,” expresses the religious experience of a man for whom alcoholic oblivion is as needless as metaphysical transmutation, for he attains the annihilation of space and time in space and time itself, penetrating into the very emptiness of being. The “boundless inane,” the “answerless silence”—this is nirvana revealing itself in the reality of the world around us.
...A move from fixed settlements to nomadism is a likely prognosis for the distant future. According to the spiral-dialectical theory of development, the future continually repeats the past on new loops and even returns to ever-earlier stages. If, in the social-economic sphere, we are headed for a classless society restoring the virtues of the original commune, then in the cultural-psychological sphere a return to nomadic life is entirely likely. Perhaps the only path to the moral regeneration of a nation reeling about in drunken visions is to give it a taste of real travelling. (M.R., “On Ancient and Modern Nomads”)
Steppies have their own initiation rite, known as the “tour of emptiness.” While most religious rituals present the newly converted with obstacles to overcome, here, on the contrary, all obstacles are deliberately removed. Preferably, the rite is conducted on level ground, as open as possible in all directions, as in a field or steppe. There are no orienting signs: right and left, forward and back are all the same. The initiate goes in circles, first widening and then narrowing back to the starting point, after which he is considered to have been “received by emptiness.” Henceforth, the emptiness he has “toured” will be within him.
The Steppies’ desire to attract the attention of an international audience is evident in K.K.’s half-mystical, half-promotional article, “The Chalice of Illuminations,” from which we present several excerpts:
In earlier times, mystically inclined young people set off for a land of dreams and wonders—to the jungles and caves of Hindustan or the peaks of Tibet; following in the tracks of Madame Blavatsky and Nikolai Roerich, they sought wisdom in inaccessible ashrams and the mountain haunts of mahatmas. Now they are coming to Russia to pitch their tents on the bare steppe. In the summer months, virtually the whole of the great Eastern European plain becomes a plateau of meditations for Western Europeans and Americans. The very country that, as the German writer Ernst Junger put it, “had managed to escape the slightest hint of the miraculous”—a country as prosaic as prose itself, as commonplace as an overcast day—suddenly got the reputation of a “chalice of illuminations.”
We usually connect the idea of mystery with hiddenness, inaccessibility. The most widespread archetypes of mystery are the cave, the thicket, the mountaintop: this is where the wise man lives, cherishing his miraculous revelation. This network of associations derives from initiation rites: to be initiated into a mystery, one must first overcome an elaborate system of obstacles.
Yet there is something more enigmatic still: the openness, the full accessibility of mystery. Precisely on the steppe, on the endless plain, you can get the feeling that the mystery is not “out there” but right here: you can touch it, but that doesn’t lessen its mysteriousness. The very greatest mystery comes to view just where there are no secrets. Level earth, everywhere the same, stretching in all directions into the infinite distance. . . . Is not the universe as a whole, in its excess of space over matter, just the same sort of uniform emptiness? And even if tracts of “masking” material do accumulate at certain far-separated points of the universe, this is still only a drop in the ocean of indiscriminate homogeneity. The universe is everywhere the same; the density of matter is no more and no less in one big chunk than in another. And this uniformity is the greatest mystery to man, accustomed as he is to experience himself as a person unlike any other.
When people go out onto the steppe for long nomadic treks, it is not in order to see something new (there is enough of that in the West), but in order to see always one and the same thing, in order to correlate themselves with the Universe. They study the characteristics of emptiness, and the emptiness fills them. This is the condition they call “vacuoplenitude.”
“On the steppe,” acknowledges one of them after a trek of about 1500 kilometers, “I attained what I had not been able to attain in three years of yoga and transcendental meditation. The world is as empty as the palms of our hands at the moment of our birth. No Savior will come to us from beyond, because God is only the Fullness of this emptiness. To accept this means to become no one, nothing at all. The only thing that matters is the place where you are standing and the place where you are going; but it is one and the same place. All the rest is non- existent.” (cited from the anthology Pilgrims in the Land of Emptiness: Observations and Meditations on the Road).
On the steppe there is no difference between “here” and “there,” and in general there are no differences at all. . . . If God did not create the steppe, at least He lives on it. The steppe is a negative made from Him Who is called God: its emptiness is the reverse of His fullness. . . . The steppe teaches a clarity which is itself the greatest mystery; no solution is adequate to it. All you can do on the steppe is exist, without expecting any events. Nothing happens to you there and nothing ever will.
There have been many teachings about what a man should do with his soul, his mind, his conscience. But no one has yet taught what to do with the steppe, what to do with this environing space, and why it stretches out all around you. On the steppe you suddenly understand that you are called to tour the emptiness. And you will always find enough emptiness to tour. Every city, every street, even every room has its own little steppe. . . .
The Russian poet and sage Tyutchev said that nature’s greatest secret is that she has no secrets. This can be seen most clearly in those hinterlands, as he puts it, “where the celestial vault so dully gazes at the bare earth. . . .” This is why Western PILGRIMS OF EMPTINESS set forth onto the steppe: they want to see face-to-face this sphinx who has no secrets. The Egyptian Sphinx, with her simple-minded riddles, the answers to which are written upside down at the bottom of the page, is a child in comparison with the Russian Sphinx, who poses no riddles. You can see right through him as he shakes his lion’s mane of wild prairie grass.” (V.A., “The God-Steppe”)
The Steppies claim that Russia is the “motherland of emptiness” and at the same time the “country of the future” or, more exactly, the “country of the end of time:” Russia, they say, is ordained to “complete the creative destiny of the world.” By way of proof they appeal to both physical and aesthetic analogies.
Among our thoughts, as among particles of matter, there must be some emptiness, so that they can generate and replace each other. One who fears emptiness is incapable of anything great. A great human being is one who has fully experienced the emptiness of the world in himself, who knows how to be empty, a nonentity among nonentities. While “genius and evildoing are incompatible,” genius and nonentity are fully compatible, and even entail one another”... Among the nonentities of the world, he is perhaps the biggest nonentity of all,” said Pushkin of the poet-genius, thus denying him any right to evildoing. To be a nonentity means to be empty, to be no one, neither good nor evil. And how appropriate it is that this poet flies from inner to outer emptiness: “to the shores of desolate waves.” In order to create, he must feel the great emptiness of nature beside him. He creates from nothing, and that is why he is “full of sound and fury”: he has to be hooked up to some emptiness in order to open the springs of inspiration. . . .
Perhaps the original act, the creation of the world from “nothing,” is reproduced time and again in the work of every thinker or artist who conjures up his own unheard-of worlds from that same emptiness, “that dark abyss” over which the Spirit of God hovered before the beginning of days. In other words, this “nothing” is needed for the fullness of the creative act—and this is exactly what we are short of in our contemporary civilization, so full of information and culture. It seems that all the emptiness of the world is already divided up among thousands of sciences, arts, theories, and practices, each squatting on its own little piece of the planet, all tracked up and trampled down. . . .
But there is still in the world a great virgin wilderness—Russia. And everything that touches her gets a spark of inspiration. “Everything must become creative in this Russia and this Russian language,” wrote Pushkin. Russia is the virgin soil of knowledge, the virgin soil of being. If there is anything great still happening in the world, that is because it is imperceptibly touching this vacuum and drawing new charges of energy from it.
A country with so much hidden space in it cannot fail to be bewitching. And even now the best contemporary minds are turning this way, peeking behind the edge of Western civilization, gazing into the pure mirror of the great plain, so as to see their own future “nothing” as the possibility of “everything.” Perhaps the reason why the first day of creation has not yet dawned over this “formless and void” land is that God is keeping it in reserve for the miraculous revelation of the last day. We believe that Russia will become the first transmundane power of this world, that the Spirit hovering over this hazy abyss will create here a new heaven and a new earth, shining with the light of faith, cleansing with the waters of knowledge, springing with the verdure of hope. In our world, nebulous Russia is the embryo of other worlds. . . .
In the book of Isaiah there is a prophecy about the great plain where the glory of God will be revealed to the whole world. “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the steppe a high way for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see God’s salvation” (Isa. 40.3-5). It is from the heart of Russia that this voice of one crying in the wilderness will be heard. The Lord’s Day, the Last Day, will come to the emptiness of Russia, straightening all ways and raising upon them a new man—the man who is to smoothe the rough places and traverse all of space, the man whose All is delivered from the moldering Nothing of his motherland into the festival of her Fulfillment. (G.N., “Plain Eschatology”)
Sinnerists
This religio-atheistic movement arose in Russia in the 1860’s and formed the shock troops of various revolutionary parties.
In some Christian-populist sects, special respect was given to “comrades-in-sin,” i.e., those who took upon themselves as much as they could of the sin of mankind. Even of hardened murderers it was said, “They have taken our sin upon themselves, they will bear Divine retribution for us.” This movement, while originally Christian, sometimes reproached Christ for not having sinned with the sinners: though he deigned to keep company with tax collectors and prostitutes, he didn’t descend all the way into their darkness. The Russian thirst for universal justice was so intense that to be among sinners without sinning oneself, to have compassion for the fallen without falling oneself, was taken as a betrayal of the brotherhood of mankind. (N.V., “Studies in Russian Sectarianism”)
This view was expressed with special force in the activities of the “Brethren in Sin,” who not only helped to shelter fugitive criminals, but actually reproduced their crimes—so as not to be “raised up before one’s brethren,” so as not to “shame” them but to “share in their sin.”
Some among us speak in the name of Christ while wishing to remain pure, as if untouched by Adam’s sin of knowledge and Cain’s sin of violence. Claiming to be more righteous than others, they say that others will die while they will be reborn to see the kingdom of God. Are these people Christians? No, they are Pharisees, for it is said, Christ came not to for the righteous but to sinners. “For Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die.... But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5.6-8). Ask yourself, then: Did Christ come for you, to bear your sin? or are you unsullied by sin, so that Christ will not come for you?
He who wishes to be with Christ must turn away from the righteous and the Pharisees, and go to the sinners. This does not mean abiding in sin. We are summoned by Christ not to sin but to be crucified together with the Savior of sinners. Following Christ, who liberated us from sin, we are to bear the weight of others’ sins, to take their sins upon ourselves, so as to be with Him on the cross. We have died for sin, but we have not yet died for our brethren in sin. He who falls into sin through temptation is a sinner, but he who takes another’s sin upon his own soul is a sinnerist. We have a sure sign of this from Christ: whoever he has freed from sin is thereby freed to take on another’s sin, as Christ himself did, when he became sin for all men. (“Rules of the Brethren in Sin”)
Sinnerists do not sin in the usual sense of the term, provoked by anger, profit, or lust. Indeed they banish from their company those brothers who fall into worldly temptation and are caught in theft or adultery. For the sinnerists, sin is a religious calling: it harrows and even shatters one’s soul, but it saves one’s brothers and is thereby justified in Christ. Their sin is committed “out of mercy and grace,” not for its own sake but for others’, not from low instincts but from the highest considerations—in order to save their brothers from sin. If a brother hates someone who oppresses him, the sinnerist kills the oppressor in order to deliver him from the sin of oppression and the brother from the sin of hatred. The sin of the oppressor is washed away by his blood, redeemed by his death agony, and passes into the soul of the sinnerist himself.
In former days too there were holy men who stooped to associate with sinners and took upon themselves the weight of their sins. Thus, in the life of John the Apostle, it is told how he took upon his own soul the sins of the wicked highwayman, thereby saving him from death and making him into the meekest lamb of God’s flock. But even the very holiest men took upon themselves only sins that had already been committed, thus assuming responsibility for them only symbolically, so to speak, and not in the very flesh of the sin. It’s as if Jesus had taken the sins of mankind upon himself while remaining all the while beside the Father on the heavenly throne, sparing himself the trouble of coming into the world and taking on human flesh. Thus it is that we too dare to take on the flesh of sin, to commit sins ourselves for the sake of our brothers. It is not just through a verbal vow of the soul that we take the sin upon ourselves, but we commit it with our flesh and blood, so that our brothers’ flesh may remain uncorrupted and pure, untouched by sin. . . . For sin, which comes through the flesh, must be expelled through the flesh. (D.N., “The Gates of the Flesh”)
There is only one path open to a man who aspires to imitate Christ: sinnerism. God took the sins of criminal mankind upon himself by becoming a man. A man can take the sins of his criminal brothers upon himself only by becoming a criminal—not out of love for the crime, but out of love for the criminal. But, as God took on human flesh immaculately and sanctified it through Himself, so the sinnerist must commit his sin immaculately and dispassionately, not so as to add to the sins of the world but rather, by taking them upon himself, to purify the world. Not passion but sobriety, not hate but love, not self- interest but self-denial are the marks of the immaculately sinnerist soul. (I.G., “The Battle for Men”)
According to some scholars, the history of terrorism in Russia began with these “Brethren in Sin” or “Fraternal Sinnerists.” Some of the brethren, while keeping their faith in Christ, believed that the Lord himself was a sinnerist, and that this was the cause of his descent into hell. “As he redeemed humanity by his human incarnation, so by his fellow—sinning he redeemed sin, sanctified his brothers in sin, and destroyed hell, where they had been in torments” (N.V., “Studies in Russian Sectarianism”). This is why all revolutionary parties have had an interest in the sectarian movement, from which they drew not only their human resources but also the moral principles of their struggle.
These hapless people—members of the People’s Will, revolutionaries and terrorists of all political persuasions—believed in the redemptive power of sacrifice. They did not stint their own blood for the font in which a new mankind would be washed, ushering in its future brotherhood. “Baptism in blood is more efficacious than the baptism of John,”2 said a famous revolutionary, one of the S.R. leaders. He may have had in mind the words of the New Testament: “This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ, not by water only, but by water and blood . . .” (1 John 5.6). Revolutionaries thus actually supplemented or even replaced the traditional baptism in water with a baptism in blood, both others’ and their own, whose convergent stream marked this bloody mystery.
... The revolutionary martyrs went further than the Christian martyrs, who joyfully ascended to Golgotha to be crucified with Christ. In the name of a Future Mankind, the revolutionaries took upon themselves the mortal sin of murder, descended into hell to suffer the cruelest torments—not the torments of the crucified flesh, but the torments of a soul that has taken upon itself the sin of Cain. The revolutionaries, at least the best of them, had more in common with the saints than with their lukewarm church-going contemporaries. They did not stand guard over their own souls and were not afraid to lose them; as Christ said, “He who loses his soul for my sake will save it” (Matt. 10.39). When they murdered, it was not for personal advantage, riches, power, or revenge; they offered their own souls in sacrifice for their neighbors’ salvation, transforming murder from an instrument of hatred and endless conflict into an instrument of love and the unification of men. Through each act of tyrannicide they were mitigating both the tyrant’s lot in the next life and his victims’ lot in this life. Not only did they dare to ascend to Golgotha together with Christ, but also to descend together with Him into hell. For He who took upon himself the sins of the world could not fail to take upon himself all the sufferings imposed upon sinners. And if He redeemed the living and vanquished death by the torments of Golgotha, He redeemed the dead and vanquished hell by the torments of Sheol. A revolutionary is one who is ready not just to be burned at the stake of the Inquisition but to enter the fire of hell. (B.S., “The Religious Justification of Bolshevism”)
Each revolutionary association had within it its own “Hell,” a group of people who knew perfectly well what path lay before their souls after death. In 1863, for example, the illegal “Fellowship” was founded in Moscow, with a strictly conspiratorial group known as “Hell” operating within it, unbeknownst to the other members. To avert suspicion, the members of “Hell” were advised to become drunks and profligates—sins which they took upon themselves while nevertheless remaining perfectly chaste and sober. They were posted to all the major cities and provinces to keep abreast of the mood of the people. In appropriate instances, they were to destroy persons whom the peasants hated and to execute any agents of the “Fellowship” who deviated from the revolutionary line in the direction of compromise. But “Hell” considered its chief task the systematic murder of tsars, which was ultimately intended to awaken the people and lead them to revolution.
These people, apparently, had been in hell already and wanted to return to it forever. (L.S., “The Theology of Nechaevism”)
A high price! A worthy ordeal! For what is our faith without love? Of love it is said: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his soul for his friends” (John 15.13). He lays down his soul.... But this means: he gives it over to the torments of hell. For how else can one “lay down one’s soul,” surrender it to torment and destruction, if all ordeals of the flesh only serve to strengthen it? If the flesh follows Christ up to Golgotha, then the soul follows Christ down into hell; this is the meaning of “losing one’s soul in the name of Christ.” Christ himself, in Paul’s words, did not know sin, but he became sin, so that we might become righteousness (2 Cor. 5.21). And St. Augustine repeated: “He is sin, so that we may be righteousness.” Did Christ not preach that we should become “sins” for our neighbors, i.e., sacrifices for their sins, suffering for them the torments of the spirit and not of the flesh alone?
True, Christ himself, according to Augustine, did not suffer in hell.” . . . He (Christ), by the power by which he is the Lord, permitted some to be tormented in hell, but he himself, by this same power, could not undergo those torments.”4 It is clear that even in Augustine’s day there were heretics who claimed that Christ had suffered the torments of hell together with the sinners: having taken their sins upon himself, could he have failed to take their sufferings as well? But even if Christ did not suffer these torments, his followers who sin out of love for their neighbors must, by their own human nature, suffer in hell; this holds not only for simple sinners but for sinnerists as well.
Nevertheless, even in connection with Christ, some doubts have arisen on this score. It has been said that Jesus, because of his Divine nature, did not suffer pain even on the cross—that his sufferings were only an illusion and an allegory for men to see. This view has been condemned as the Monophysite heresy. If Christ, while being God, could still truly suffer on the cross by virtue of his human nature, as the Church teaches, why then could he not suffer the genuine torments of hell, that very “pitch darkness and grinding of teeth” that his Father had prepared for all sinners, including the first of the sinnerists, His own Son, who took upon himself the sins of others?...
Moreover, King David, “seeing this before, spake of the resurrection of Christ, that His soul was not left in hell, neither did His flesh see corruption” (Acts 2.31). But this means that his soul was in hell; and could it have failed to suffer with all the sufferers there, when even on earth his flesh had suffered the pains of all the mortal sons of man? And if he redeemed men by the torments of his sinless flesh, then he could have overthrown hell only by the torments of his sinless soul. (S.B., “Sinnerism in the Light of the Church’s Teaching on Hell”) .
The account of Christ’s descent into hell has not become a subject of Church dogma; it belongs to the darkest, most indecipherable pages of Holy Scripture. The fact that it is hardly mentioned in the New Testament testifies, in the view of certain thinkers, to its archetypal meaning for the Third Covenant, the covenant that mankind will make with God on the eve of the final, apocalyptic phase of world history. Moved by the example of Christ’s saving death and the dream of blood brotherhood, all mankind is on the path of sacrificial sin to the gates of hell. They will smash those gates, just as the earthly stronghold of the Bastille was smashed in its day. And at the head of this hell-bound procession of all the nations marches Russia, inspired by her own leaders to accept the baptism of blood. In the words of a well-known poet to the Socialist Revolutionary leader of the February Revolution: “Russia is ready to follow you even into hell itself!” “And the immensity of our sacrifices will shake the very walls of hell,” as another poet put it after the October Revolution.
This descent into hell, this fearless surrender of the soul to satanic mutilation, this readiness to pay for the resurrection of the spirit with the death of the soul—this has always marked the Russian. The fate of his poor, despairing country has always led him to the ultimate, the most terrible sacrifice: the sacrifice of Cain, who killed his brother out of love and jealousy of God, out of desire for God’s mercy and contempt for his own gifts. Cain offered three sacrifices: first, the fruits of his husbandry; second, the flesh of Abel; and third, his own soul. Our nation too has offered three sacrifices: first, the sacrifice of its age- old poverty, for which it did not win favor; second, the sacrifice of its brother’s blood in intestine wars, for which it was cursed: turning her face away, the earth ceased to bear fruit for Russia. And third, the sacrifice of its own sin-racked soul. . . .
And now we await the day when the gates of hell shall part and we, who took up our cross and our torment, following Christ further than Golgotha, deeper than Gehenna, will finally be led forth by Christ. We believe that ineffable mercy awaits those who go to hell for others, suffering the greatest torments for them. To lay down one’s soul for one’s brothers is the highest stage of love, transcending the fear not only of earthly but of infernal damnation. Such love passes beyond hell, it annihilates hell. (D.M., “The Three Sacrifices of Russia”)
...On the eve of the Revolution there were two paths of renewal and development for Russian religious consciousness. The first was the missionary path taken by Merezhkovsky, Rozanov, Berdyaev and the other so-called “God-seekers,” the prophets and preachers of the Third Testament. They conceived of the Third Testament as the Testament of the Third Hypostasis, through which God’s will would be carried out in the contemporary world. This was to be the Testament of the Holy Spirit, pouring forth over all flesh; a Testament uniting the truth of paganism with the truth of Christianity, sanctifying the mystery of sex; the Testament of a new religious community, a Church throwing its gates open to the world and openly dwelling in the world; the Testament of free religious creativity, replacing both the Old Testament of law and obedience and the New Testament of suffering and redemption. . . . These ideas, however beautiful in themselves, appear from our present historical perspective as rather starry-eyed, dreamy, and immature.
The second path of renewal was the revolutionary one taken by the People’s Will and the Socialist Revolutionaries; along this path the Bolsheviks went furthest of all. Where the God-seekers appealed to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the atheists and revolutionaries, who did not believe in the Spirit, offered it the sacrifice of their own flesh and soul. This sacrificial mode, this initiation into the mystery of blood, was unacceptable to the God-seekers, who wanted to sanctify blood without shedding it.
These, then, were the main divisions of the religious quest of the Russian people. Some, the more contemplative ones, looked for the sanctification of the world by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Others, the more practical ones, took the path of sacrifice, laying down their own flesh and soul for their brothers, embracing their own condemnation to the fires of hell. Both camps put their hopes in the Third Testament, each interpreting it in its own way. One side called it the “Testament of the Holy Spirit,” the other, the “Testament of the Descent into Hell.” One found its archetype in the New Testament narrative of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, the other in the descent of Jesus Christ into hell. In the theological tradition, one version was called the “Spiritual Testament”—confirmed by faith without blood—and the other the “Infernal Testament,” confirmed by blood without faith.
Apparently, the revolutionary idea has defeated the missionary: blood has drowned out faith and displaced it from the historical being of the people. But experience shows that these ideas can only be implemented in concert, in the unity of the Third Covenant. Can there be a covenant without sacrifice? Can one be resurrected in the spirit without dying in the soul? The long via crucis of our nation, on which millions have fallen in torment, is now leading us once more towards the fulfillment of the only prophecies that can justify such a path. The nation that has voluntarily suffered the curse of hell as its own sin- offering is the only nation prepared for the mature and perfect acceptance of the gifts of the Spirit....
Before the Revolution, without the Revolution, when it lived only in the wishes of thinkers and the visions of seers, the Third Testament could not be completed or even begun. Like every Covenant, it had to be confirmed in blood—the blood of the Lamb. But in this case, the sacrifice turned out to be not the Paschal Lamb and not the Son of Man, but an entire nation, a collective image of suffering humanity—for this Covenant is fulfilled not in the Shepherd’s salvation of his chosen flock but in the transfiguration of the entire human race, the free outpouring of its creative spirit. The key point here is that this nation was not sacrificed to someone else’s treacherous passions, as a pawn in someone else’s game; nor was it simply suffering for its own sins; no, this nation brought itself as a sacrifice, took upon itself both the sin and the punishment for the money-lust and power-lust of all the nations. This is the only nation in history to have been crucified—and that not at the hands of some external torturer, but by crucifying itself, destroying the flesh of some of its members, the souls of others.
Such a nation must be called not a sinful nation but a sinnerist nation. A sinner tries to avoid punishment; a sinnerist brings it upon himself. The Russian people took upon itself all mankind’s sin of violence; and for that sin it sold itself into bondage, into the torments of hell. Tormentor and tormented converged in the grimace of one and the same nation, distorted by malice and illuminated by suffering. This self-crucifixion was required so that God could make the Third Covenant with mankind—on the blood of the murderer-nation, the sacrificial nation, the savior-nation....
The contemplative theorists of the Holy Spirit erred by omitting from their prophetic gaze the whole enormous, bloody epoch needed to prepare their Covenant and make it realizeable. In their view a “donative” Covenant was possible without sin, without sacrifice, without death; and thus they missed the meaning of the Russian Revolution. Even more, though, did the active promoters of the Russian Revolution miss the ultimate religious and redemptive meaning of their struggle. Now we are turning again to the legacy of those contemplatives who rejected the Revolution, for it is precisely thanks to the Revolution and its countless sacrifices that their highest hopes may now be realized. Such is the bright irony of history. . . . (A.K., “The Third Covenant: The Russian Experience and the World’s Hope”)
The experience of Russian history has shown that gifts and sacrifices are powerless in themselves. Christ’s descent into hell and the Holy Spirit’s descent onto earth not only followed in chronological sequence in the sacred history, but the meaning of each was determined by the other. Together they form God’s integral motion towards man: in His Second Person He descends to the sinners in hell, while in His Third Person He descends to the redeemed on earth, to His Apostles.
The integration of the Infernal Covenant with the Spiritual Covenant in the unity of the Third Covenant—this is the lesson of Russian history; this is the religious task of the Russian people. To gain the Holy Spirit through willingness to sacrifice not only one’s flesh but one’s soul as well, to accept not only the cross of Golgotha but also the tortures of Gehenna—herein lies the fullness of the Covenant to come. The spirit cannot be born unless the soul dies. “It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption,” says the Apostle Paul. Not only human flesh but the human soul as well must undergo corruption, so that the Spirit may be born in immortal flesh and soul. The corruption of the flesh destroyed by suffering and the corruption of the soul destroyed by sin are the work of the Spirit clearing itself a path through the human depths. As it is written: “It is sown a body of soul, it is raised a body of spirit.... Howbeit the spirit-body was not first, but the soul-body; and afterward the spirit-body” (1 Cor. 15.44, 46). Each man’s earthly lot is given him for the mortification of his soul. Those who choose hell are chosen for salvation. Those who lose their souls for their brothers’ sake will be raised in the Spirit of their Father.
...Human wisdom will never be able to grasp how it is that a soul stained with violence and murder can appear in white vestments before the Lord. It will never grasp how the gates of hell, shut by sin, are opened by sinnerism. “But the man of soul receives not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him.... But he that is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is judged of no man” (1 Cor. 2.14-15). A man who lays down his soul for his brother is foolish. A nation that lays down its soul for mankind is foolish. And a sinnerist is no different from a sinner, although he liberates the sinner while giving himself into bondage to the sinner’s sin. Thus does the man of soul judge the spiritual man, although without the power to judge....
How wondrous it is that in the prophets Hosea and Joel, the Biblical presages of the Infernal and Spiritual Covenants directly follow one another in the same sacred order:
“I shall redeem them from the power of hell, I shall save them from death. Death! where is thy sting? Hell! where is thy victory? I shall not repent of this” (Hos. 13.14).
And on the very next page:
“And it shall come to pass afterwards that I will pour forth My Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophecy” (Joel 2.28).
The Spirit will be poured forth upon the flesh—but for that to happen, the flesh must first prepare itself for the pouring forth of the Spirit. The flesh of the flesh must be given over to death in order to pluck out death’s sting; the soul of the soul must be given over to hell in order to pluck out hell’s victory. Death destroys the flesh, hell consumes the soul—and only then does the Spirit itself take on incorruptible flesh and an incorruptible soul, having overcome death and hell through Christ. (V.S., “On the Soul and the Spirit”)
From Cries in the New Wilderness, Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002
Mikhail N. Epstein (Epshtein) was born in Moscow in 1950 but has lived in the United States since 1990, where he teaches at Emory University. He remains one of Russia's most respected philosophers and theorists, and the author of a range of quirky, highly individualistic, somewhat Borgesian projects--invented researches, disciplines, arts, neologisms on subjects as varied as “touch art,” new movements in Russian poetry, and "post-atheism." He works through what he calls "potentiation" that "both inherits the method of deconstruction and moves beyond it"-- towards a kind of constructive inventiveness. His latest project is “On the Future of the Humanities: Paradigmatic Shifts and Emerging Concepts”.
Translations of Epstein’s 17 books and approximately 400 essays and articles can often be found in library catalogues under his Russian surname, Epshtein.
Eve Adler (1945 – 2004) was an American classicist who taught at Middlebury College for 25 years, a graduate of Queens College and Brandeis University.