clearly have forgotten something. When the pilgrim in The Way of a Pilgrim discovers his other, self-moving self, the automaton within him, he exclaims, ‘Lord! What a mysterious thing man is!’6 Forgetting is not necessarily a bad thing. It would be insane always to remember everything. ‘How handsome you are, how intelligent, how healthy, how admirably you live your life, what a lot you know!’ All that is no doubt true, but it might be a good idea to forget it. Is forgetfulness ever a disgrace? It can be. It was disgraceful for Russia to forget that religion is, quite literally, the law; and to forget that 300 years ago the primary meaning of ‘the law’ was ‘faith’, ‘religion’. It would be different if human nature had changed in the intervening period, but it has not; it is still just the same. Attending to our salvation and redemption remains our law, fundamental, immediate and constantly at work within us, but that is something we have forgotten, and that is a disgrace.
If I have forgotten where I put the scissors and am looking for them, that is tiresome, even disgraceful; I am ashamed to be losing my marbles. If, however, I have forgotten that I owe someone money, I will not even be trying to acquire some. If the person who lent me the money is waiting, I really ought to go and see him. Better still, I should do the right thing, go and see him, ring his doorbell and tell him, very pleased with myself, that here I am and have brought the money I owe. But instead I have forgotten all about the debt, I am not where I should be, standing on my creditor’s doorstep with a self-satisfied smirk, but am somewhere else. To make matters worse, nobody else in the world knows I am in the wrong place. My creditor continues to trust (credere, to believe) all is well, and supposes that if I have not come to see him it is probably because I am getting the money, earning it perhaps, and conscientiously making arrangements to repay the debt.
Perhaps a person is not where he should be, not because he has yet to find his place in life, but because he has never thought to look for it. I need to remember a phone number but can’t, so I use a mnemonic technique, having taken Freud’s advice and tried free association of ideas. What technique can I use, though, if I have forgotten what it is that I have forgotten?
The expression for this in asceticism we have already mentioned: the technique of techniques, τἐχνη τɛχνῶν. Just as asceticism, as the theologians rightly remind us, is by no means the same as monasticism – there is asceticism for the family and asceticism has a long history in philosophy – so self-discovery is for everybody. ‘At the commencement of prayer, ask the Lord Jesus Christ for true self-discovery of your disastrous inner state, your spiritual poverty and complete inability to abide by your own efforts in virtue…. The path of self-perfection is a path of contrite self-discovery, awareness that you are blind, deaf, mute and naked.’7
This is so far common to all. Philosophy with its techniques does the same thing. We recall Wittgenstein’s warnings that we are incurably blind. ‘The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.’ ‘We are asleep. Our life is a dream, but we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.’ According to Plato, we are always just halves, symbols.
‘Concentration is as essential for true prayer as a lamp is for light. Train your mindfulness; it is prayer better than anything else that keeps track of it.’8 There is only one form of concentration, one form of mindfulness; if you have a church-going kind of concentration and a church-going attention span and they dissipate when you leave the church, you just need to pay more attention, until it ceases to squander itself on trying to distance itself from some other kind of mindfulness.
This is just a general guide to prayer, the commonplaces related to unceasing prayer. ‘In order to concentrate the mind on the content of prayer, you must bring it into your heart.’ Next, warmth. ‘The heart will immediately respond to this concentration with a subtle feeling that is the beginning of inner warmth.’9 There can, however, be the danger in warmth that it may prove to be sensual arousal.
The effort of concentrating is hard at first, but then it becomes the automatic self-movement of prayer. It addresses the automaton; it is the opposite of a mechanical response in which we are not participating, merely observing the automaton from outside, setting it going. On the contrary, we sink into the automaton.
On this path, there are many dangers: ‘any vice may possess a man’. The very description of them is terrifying: ‘the progeny of hell’; ‘a soul covered in wounds descends in unendurable sufferings to the depths of despair’.10 By now we may be wondering whether it was such a great idea to enter the dark forest, but this is an ordeal of purification, and those who pass through it are rewarded.
Let us turn to The Pilgrim. The Pilgrim (strannik) has revealed to him a strange person. We have called the divine wisdom and its automaton strange. In the landscape of strangeness, strangeness grows within Sophia, the divine wisdom. There is no other place where the cultural or spiritual or creative dimension is purified by the ideal processing and assimilating the material. Here there is no depressing experience of death, the death, say, of culture or education. Despair comes when we plan, when we hoped to do something good but as usual it did not turn out as we wished. ‘As usual’ is bad, and we wanted something better than ‘as usual’, something good. But let us ask why ‘as usual’ is bad and leaves us dissatisfied. It is precisely because our plans were for something different and things did not turn out in accordance with them. Our soul is anguished by the difference between how things are and how they should be. We see it only too clearly. There it is. We have work to do. We work on it.
In the landscape of The Pilgrim, there is nothing remotely resembling that gap. He is surrounded not by ‘dead matter’ (there is such an expression), but by the forest before it turns into matter. Metric space is absent, there are no signposts to guide us, and the only appropriate reaction is a combination of fear, mindfulness, and caution, ɛύλἀβɛια. The goal is not to fulfil a plan, which does not exist and could not be carried out in the forest, but the difference between the frightening, alien entrancement of the forest and his own, redemptive entrancement. The forest has within it a potential both for danger and for redemption. In the dark forest, the only possibility is to become lost and disappear, but we have a choice between different ways of becoming lost. Fleeing from the forest into what merely appears through lack of insight to be dead matter is not an escape from danger to redemption, but fleeing from choosing between them back into the realm of plans. In place of ɛύλἀβɛια, in place of the technique of techniques, the art of arts, there is only technology. Instead of engaging with the forest, we merely flee from it into the realm of artifice.
The opening of The Pilgrim reads:
By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast-pocket a Bible. And that is all.
On the 24th Sunday after Pentecost I went to church to say my prayers there during the Liturgy. The first Epistle of St Paul to the Thessalonians, and among other words I heard these – ‘Pray without ceasing.’ It was this text, more than any other, which forced itself upon my mind, and I began to think how it was possible to pray without ceasing. (15)
The commentator to the first Epistle to the Thessalonians, 5: 17, hastens to clarify that this means pray spiritually with ceasing. The Pilgrim is not up to dealing in such subtleties, thank God. Pray without ceasing means pray without ceasing. Full stop.
He treks through forests mainly, not as a spiritual being remote from the things of this world, but as a solitary human being. ‘Thus once more I set out on my lonely way…. It happened at times that for three days together I came upon no human dwelling, and in the uplifting of my spirit I felt as though I were alone on the earth’ (77–8). People want to help him and say, ‘Here is a nice fellow-traveller for you.’ ‘God be with you and with him too,’ said I, ‘but surely you know that it is never my way to travel with other people. I always wander about alone’ (86). Other people are constantly and powerfully present, but either as death, or murder, the abyss, stupefied by drunkenness,