Perhaps only such a person can be granted unconditional liberation, and in his condition he received it not only for himself – he was half-crazy and unable to define and delimit himself – but, as it were, for himself and on behalf of all people. This was, perhaps, not yet total liberation, but a liberation it clearly was.
And when with all this in my mind I prayed with my heart, everything around me seemed delightful and marvellous: the trees [he is in the forest, his immediate environment is trees, Bibikhin], the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, the light, seemed to be telling me that they existed for man’s sake, that they witnessed to the love of God for man, and that all things prayed to God and sang His praise. [The trees spoke to him, Bibikhin.] Thus it was that I came to understand what the Philokalia calls ‘the knowledge of the speech of all creatures,’ and I saw the means by which converse could be held with God’s creatures. (45)
The forest becomes ever more dense around him until he eventually walks for three days without coming upon any village at all.
My supply of dried bread was used up, and I began to be very much cast down at the thought I might die of hunger. I began to pray my hardest in the depths of my heart. All my fears went, and I entrusted myself to the will of God. My peace of mind came back to me, and I was in good spirits again. (46)
In the very depths of the forest, he stayed and lived with a forester who had kept watch over it for ten years. The forester lived on bread and water and, moreover, wore penitential chains weighing over 30 kg next to his skin, and was, accordingly, practising his asceticism even more strongly than the Pilgrim. ‘I never swear, drink neither wine nor beer, I never quarrel with anyone at all, and I have had nothing to do with women and girls all my life’ (48–9).
But this is not the Way. ‘Unless you have God in your mind and the ceaseless Prayer of Jesus in your heart’, all will be in vain (50). The only way is to cleave to Christ in all his dear sweetness, warmth, and peace.
Here, in the very depths of the forest, the Pilgrim finally learned to trust himself and began looking for ‘ceaseless self-acting prayer in the heart’ (51). He found it, again accompanied by auspicious signs. ‘Sometimes my heart would feel as though it were bubbling with joy, such lightness, freedom and consolation were in it’ (55).
One note, though, about techniques of prayer: in stark contrast with the simplicity and naturalness of the ‘self-movement’ that the Pilgrim will come to, his techniques of twelve thousandfold repetition of a seven-word phrase, of sitting in a special posture while praying, of focusing his attention on the heart, are not just manifestly not ‘self-moving’ but are, as he himself admits, manifestly compulsive. They are methods applied specifically to the body and emotions, while what he is seeking is neither specific nor constrained. The Pilgrim’s transition from mechanical to self-acting prayer has a glaring and intentional paradox at its heart. We can find passages, not one but several, that manifestly illustrate this dichotomy or paradox, right there in the text of the Pilgrim. He is teaching a blind man, who already engages in unceasing prayer but has not yet discovered how ‘the mind finds the heart’ (114) (or what Feodosiy of Karula calls ‘the place in the heart’).12
[Y]ou can imagine with your mind and picture to yourself13 [note that imagine and picture! Bibikhin] what you have seen in time past, such as a man or some object or other, or one of your own limbs…. Then picture to yourself your heart in just the same way, turn your eyes to it just as if you were looking at it through your breast, and picture it as clearly as you can. And with your ears listen closely to its beating, beat by beat14 … with the first beat say or think ‘Lord,’ with the second, ‘Jesus.’ … Thus, as you draw your breath in, say, or imagine[!] yourself saying, ‘Lord Jesus Christ’, and as you breathe out again, ‘have mercy on me.’
That is on p. 115, and in the same paragraph he continues, ‘But then, whatever you do, be on your guard against imagination and any sort of visions. Don’t accept any of them whatever, for the holy Fathers lay down most strongly that inward prayer should be kept free from visions, lest one fall into temptation.’
Are we really to suppose that whoever wrote The Pilgrim failed to notice this lexical absurdity: ‘Picture! Imagine!’ ‘Guard against imaginings, pictures!’? Perhaps he did, but wrote it anyway, as if he had not noticed. The paradox is almost thrown in our face. Does that make the incongruity, which is unquestionably important and even crucial, only all the clearer and more splendid? Has anyone already decided?
Let me make it easier by giving two examples of ‘picturing’. During the course of these conversations, the Pilgrim and the blind man are wandering in the forests of Siberia (‘we were walking through a forest,’ 116). ‘Suddenly he said to me, “What a pity! The church is already on fire; there, the belfry has fallen.” “Stop this vain dreaming,” I said, “it is a temptation to you. You must put all such fancies aside at once.”’ It was exactly what the Fathers of the Church had denounced, was it not? A call to sober-mindedness, a warning against daydreams. The blind man meekly obeyed, fell silent, and continued his praying. When they had gone twelve versts, they entered the town and saw several burnt houses still smouldering and the collapsed belfry. The blind man had seen it just as it was falling.
The purpose of the interdiction of imagining and picturing is to liberate a different kind of imagining and picturing, to restore the vision of the seer. Does that mean those techniques of compulsion serve to liberate? What is liberated is nothing less than the prophetic, intelligent human being from the rot and the filth of coagulated putrefaction.
The human soul … can see even in the darkness, both what happens a long way off as well as things near at hand. Only we do not give force and scope to this spiritual power. We crush it beneath the yoke of our gross bodies, or with our haphazard thoughts and ideas. (116–17)
That ‘or’ is preceded by a comma, meaning that the yoke of our bodies includes the haphazardness of our thoughts. Let us recall the bonds in the Gospel according to St Matthew. The body becomes gross not when it is given freedom – of itself the body is wise – but when by perfidious bonds it is entangled by our thoughts. The Pilgrim’s whole purpose is to collect and preserve himself every minute, every second; in this way, the body returns to the body and the mind is returned to the mind. This important part of the text is marked out, unexpectedly and inconspicuously, by the fact that the language is transformed into good, classical Russian philosophical discourse. That is not something that comes without real mental effort, the only way words can be chosen so felicitously. ‘But when we concentrate within ourselves, when we draw away from everything around us and become more subtle and refined in mind, then the soul comes into its own and works to its fullest power’ (117).
In the course Know Thyself, and later in Wittgenstein,15 and again, if only briefly, elsewhere, we have touched on, or rather been touched by the angelic wing of, the topic of ‘the double’. This is a topic so personal to me that I have yet to make up my mind whether or not to go public on it. But here too, following on from the paragraph from which the last quotation was taken, on the soul’s coming into its own, the topic seems once more to sear me in passing and disappear. The soul’s breaking out of its prison continues to be discussed:
[T]here are people (even such as are not given to prayer, but who have this sort of power, or gain it during sickness) who see light even in the darkest of rooms, as though it streamed from every article in it [this is the same as the logos of things discussed in earlier lectures, Bibikhin], and see things by it [their invisibility means that they are radiating their essence]; who see their doubles16 and enter into the thoughts of other people. (117)
The soul released from prison lives in a state of stable, constant celebration.
I felt there was no happier person on earth than I, and I doubted if there could be greater and fuller happiness in the kingdom of Heaven…. Everything drew me to love and thank God…. Sometimes I felt as light as though I had no body and was floating happily through the air instead of walking. Sometimes when I withdrew into myself I saw clearly all my internal organs, and was filled with wonder