loving him, discovering heaven and weeping with joy.
The guidelines of metric, calibrated space only confuse this man of the forest, who lives by the heart and breathing, not by the mind (if by that we understand something separate from the heart). His concern is so completely with the heart that he thinks no more about his mind than he does about bread: if there is none, there is none and it is time to die. If there is bread, that is a miracle. When deserting soldiers fall upon him in the forest, they decide there is no point talking to this incoherent wanderer and beat him senseless. When he regains consciousness, he is not in the least concerned about having been unconscious or the possibility of suffering from concussion: the brain is no more his than money, the body, or clothing. And accordingly his body, clothes, and mind serve him obediently and faultlessly.
The Pilgrim’s breathing is like thought, his inhaling and exhaling a cautious probing of the world. We are reminded, to anticipate, of one point in pre-Socratic philosophy where the cosmic mind is absorbed through breathing. We guess why, in Leonardo’s likening of the earth to a living creature, there is no mind, no consciousness, no brain: the breathing of the earth, the rising and falling of the tides, are how it senses the cosmos. Consciousness can add nothing to the way the earth absorbs the world into itself through this breathing, and might even detract from it: when a cautious, tentative probing of the world is taking place with every inhalation and exhalation, the whole world and all its wisdom, Sophia, is being sensed; not just one’s own, limited mind but all minds.
Are humans dissolved, lost, in the world? How can we put it? They absorb the world and are absorbed by it, but to the extent that they meekly withstand and endure their own emptiness, impoverished and receptive, they become so unique that they alone stand out (in their solipsism, we can say after reading Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger) from absolutely everything else.
There is here a curious contrast: total acceptance of everything and of any world, just as it is, no matter how it may conduct itself, obedience to it; indeed, dissolution, but that is because there is a power cast into the world that consists, as it were, of pure attentiveness, intent scrutiny. In the Pilgrim’s intellectual baggage, as in his knapsack, there is only bread, never anything more than his daily bread. Christianity is not a system of knowledge but a craving, an attraction, and to what we shall shortly see. What corresponds to this state of emptiness, this pure bafflement about how unceasing prayer can be possible (since a person ‘must practise other matters in order to support his life’), to this utter helplessness, is the very extremity of what he desires: divinity for his entire self, even when asleep: ‘The continuous interior Prayer of Jesus is a constant, uninterrupted calling upon the divine Name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart; while forming a mental picture of His constant presence, and imploring His grace, during every occupation, at all times, in all places, even during sleep’ (22). ‘I sleep, but my heart waketh.’ This is a huge demand, if you recall the tone of blissful happiness beyond measure with which these words are uttered in the Song of Solomon, 5: 2. This penniless wanderer is anticipating just such an encounter, in which everything will be fulfilled.
The Pilgrim succeeds in this. He begins with the unceasing prayer to Jesus, which at first he pronounces out loud, forcing himself: ‘… repeat only the following words constantly, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Compel yourself to do it always,’ he is told by a holy man (26). We can readily imagine that, pronouncing these words of the prayer 3,000 times, then 6,000, then 12,000 times a day, forcing himself at first, he would eventually learn to do so from habit and find it easier.
To begin with, this ceaseless saying of the Prayer at first brought a certain amount of weariness, my tongue felt numbed, I had a stiff sort of feeling in my jaws. I had a feeling at first pleasant but afterwards slightly painful in the roof of my mouth. The thumb of my left hand, with which I counted my beads, hurt a little. I felt a slight inflammation in the whole of that wrist, and even up to the elbow, which was not unpleasant. Moreover, all this aroused me, as it were, and urged me on to frequent saying of the Prayer. For five days I did my set number of 12,000 prayers, and as I formed the habit I found at the same time pleasure and satisfaction in it. (28)
But this was only like the starter motor turning over the engine. The serious business began when the engine started. This is not an inappropriate metaphor. Let us remember that the mover, movement of a mover by another mover, and prime mover are important philosophical terms. Like any metaphor, it takes us only so far before failing, and where it fails is where we encounter something that is impossible in mechanics. Perpetual motion is an impossibility and there cannot be a motionless prime mover. An automaton is a mechanical impossibility.
The praying which the Pilgrim learned is called self-moving, self-acting prayer. It came as a greater surprise than if he gained something: a new skill, for example. It was a different kind of enrichment from what he was looking for, and it was not something he acquired: he found himself. He discovered that this self-mover, this automaton, was something he had always been.
There is all the difference, all the interest (inter-esse), between what had become an agreeable habit, a mechanism, something that had become a settled pious practice after some initial compulsion involving skill, and what was vouchsafed the Pilgrim. His holy man, his starets, said,
Be thankful to God that this desire for the Prayer and this facility in it have been manifested in you. It is a natural consequence which follows constant effort and spiritual achievement. So a machine to the principal wheel of which one gives impetus works for a long while afterwards by itself…. You see what feelings can be produced even outside a state of grace in a soul which is sinful and with passions unsubdued. (29)
This is all mechanics, but it is quite different when ‘God is pleased to grant the gift of self-acting spiritual prayer’ (ibid.).
The receiving of this gift of self-activating or self-moving prayer was accompanied by good signs. ‘If I happened to meet anyone, all men without exception were as dear to me as if they had been my nearest relations…. My lonely hut seemed like a splendid palace’ (30). ‘Everybody was kind to me, it was as though everyone loved me’ (31). For the time being, there were only signs, as if the Pilgrim were being drawn almost against his will into a vortex, a whirlpool, and he found that strange.
I have become a sort of half-conscious person. I have no cares and no interests. The fussy business of the world I would not give a glance to. The one thing I wish for is to be alone, and all by myself to pray, to pray without ceasing; and doing this, I am filled with joy. God knows what is happening to me! (32)11
A sense of danger, of dizziness, because one has been caught up by forces immeasurably greater than oneself. An auspicious craziness, and yet one is not even at the threshold, only on the far-off approaches. ‘Of course, all this is sensuous, or as my departed starets said, an artificial state which follows naturally upon routine’ (ibid.).
This is joy at the ending of blistered feet and weariness, the gliding along of human existence; it is the free soaring that is sometimes mistaken for the full measure of the freedom conferred upon the Pilgrim. This man has taken on a yoke; he is engrossed every minute in the issue of salvation or perdition, and that is already a change he will prefer to any other lot. He is, though, still unimaginably far away from what is to come.
‘In this blissful state I passed more than two months of the summer. For the most part I went through the forests and along by-roads’ (35). In the forest, though, there was nothing to eat, and he went hungry. In the dark forest, there can be robbers, and he was robbed. ‘When I came to I found myself lying in the forest by the roadside robbed. My knapsack had gone: all that was left of it were the cords from which it hung, which they had cut’ (35–6). But he thanks God. He needed this to calm him down, to ensure even further that he had no possessions of his own. You may ask, was that so as, in return, to gain something especially valuable? That is how we are used to thinking, but it seems it would be mistaken here. The truth is evidently that the Pilgrim needed to yield, to give up absolutely everything. But surely he must at least have something to hold on to, something to keep him alive? No, nothing; and if his life goes on, then this is purely through grace and, actually, by a miracle.
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