alien were to come close to the earth in a mountainous region devoid of forest, he would find the planet no different from a sterile asteroid. He would be unable to understand why there should be air and water lower down, and even more puzzling would be the meadows and forest. The earth might have been an asymmetrical lump of rock if wind, and water expanding in cracks when it froze, had not dragged the mountain peaks down to the plains. The soil settling there from mudslides became almost as smooth as the water that had brought it down. One could imagine that the rocks and mountains were thrown, sprayed at the earth from above, while its roundness resulted from slow erosion by wind and water. The earth may have been thoroughly angular, a hotchpotch of bits of the asteroids which bombarded it over billions of years. How did those bare bones come to be covered in organic tissue? That is an interesting question, but not one we are called upon to answer. The question for us is, could it be that, just as the thing closest to us, our body, almost never comes into our field of vision, so the same is true of the entity on which we exist. Our body is viewed from the outset – we are after all spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings – as a means of attaining ends: for example, by working. May the same not be true of the earth? We have only to frame the question in those terms for the answer to be obvious.
The summits of mountains are snowy, icy, or bare, as if the earth were still being buffeted by the solar wind. It is much the same at both poles. Then suddenly, below a height of four kilometres, the forest begins, it descends from there along with the streams, and would continue down into the valleys but for people. In regions levelled by water, half the forest has been cut down, or more than half, or all of it. Leonardo da Vinci was right: the mountains have been levelled by wind and water. It seemed to him there was something wrong about that: something must have happened to the earth and it seemed to be bleeding to death. The water, draining away, left plains.
Nowadays, great cities stand on those plains in which, thanks to their dwellings, electricity, mains water, and sewerage, a different metabolism has been created. A different luminary shines round the clock and there is a different habitat. Only, as it is so elegantly put, nowadays that habitat is in a state of ‘environmental disequilibrium’. In other words, the city cannot exist without further ploughing up of the soil around it, and further pollution of the soil, air, and water. A major city stands out on the plain like a rash of eczema or an allergy. The forest has been felled so that the plain can be ploughed up so that the city can be fed. In exchange, the city belches out chemicals, radiation, and gases. The mountains are being eroded and levelled to make way for the forest, while the forest makes way for people. As people proliferate, they cut their primal environment down and plough it up. The mismanagement is causing degradation of the soil. Just as the deserts of Arabia and North Africa were caused by protracted human ‘management’, so people nowadays are making a global desert for themselves. Neglect the ecology of the fields and you get a desert.
Using the level ground and the forests in this manner, there is clearly something people have not thought through. Proliferation of great cities has been a mistake, as their planners are themselves forced to admit. It seems that in this respect, too, there is no topic more important than the forest.
The number 2000 appeared only on the pages of newspapers and on screens. Looking down from the air, looking at the great cities spilling over the plains, the number appeared to herald nothing whatsoever. Unless perhaps a glimmer of hope that humans might wake up, at least partly, and open their eyes. What people love – old churches, castles in the mountains – shows that a different way of treating the earth is possible, but they appreciate these things aesthetically, and enjoy holidays in the countryside only then to return to their globalism. To encompass the world ‘globally’ seems now to be the aim of almost everything anybody does, but that focus does not mean any more attention is being paid to the earth itself. On the contrary, it is lost behind plans and screen images as never before. Globalism is a sick imitation of paying attention to the earth, just as the main aim of the comprehensive studying of ‘humankind’ is not to notice what the Pilgrim discovered when he decided to become mindful. He discovered the nature of his own breathing, of his heartbeat, of the way he ate. He noticed what he ate, and how he related to other bodies.
In globalization, a mindful attitude towards the earth is the last thing we can hope for. People are as blithely unaware of the nature of this living entity as they are of the animal that they are themselves, and they will pay no heed to it until it revolts. They regress back to the forest in their tobacco smoking, wine bibbing, and drug taking; the forest, so long dispossessed, thus cruelly avenges the injury directly in the big city centre.
Even a less striking overpopulation in the classical world brought the Trojan War down on humankind, and the earth’s vengeance on the big city will be infinitely more terrible. A return to religion, that is, to philosophy – but not by any stretch of the imagination to that sick counterfeit, religious philosophy – seems almost certain.
Trains, planes, and cars encompass not matter but a pre-identified business segment. Tourists imagine they are broadening their narrow horizons and seeing the world, but in reality they are mere exploiters, blissfully unaware that they are only tightening the grip of industrialization. There is good reason to refer to their activities as the tourist industry. Criticism of civilization, by keeping it in the headlines, only serves to consolidate it.
There is something strangely hopeful and offbeat, something almost of the holy fool, about the lands of Russia and the way that here the sprawling of our standardized cities over the plains is dysfunctional, tentative, as if subverted in advance by our nervous haste, the provisional nature of almost all decisions, and the manifest absence of any trustworthy, long-term strategy such as we find, for example, in America. There is no call for us to envy America its strategy, with its centuries-long perspective (in the conservation of forests, in the deliberate limiting of arable land, and its preference for buying in oil rather than extracting it locally). By contrast, our own strategy seems short of breath, not to say suffocating. Why? Because where exploitation of the earth is concerned it is better not to have a strategy than to have one. The only right approach is to recognize that what matters is not know-how or the lack of it, but awareness that the world’s Sophia is not to be found in technology, however ultramodern and sophisticated. In the absurd rootlessness of our technological invasion of the forest, of which a glaring and literal example is the ridiculous building of opulent villas in Moscow province by people unfortunate enough to have picked up all the money they found lying at their feet (just as the communists had the misfortune to seize power that was theirs for the taking), we seem to believe that, because of a drowsy awareness that it will not be human intelligence that puts everything back in place, all attempts to behave rationally should be shunned.
Notes
1 1. Religion meant connection only in the primitive Christian imagination of Lactantius. The true etymology is re-lego, from ‘legere’, respect for heritage, awe. [AM]
2 2. Vasilisk of Turov (d. 1824) was an Orthodox monk who lived in the wilderness in Siberia. He was canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2004. Zosima Verkhovskii (1768–1833) was an Orthodox schema monk (from the Greek word σχῆμα – image) who founded two convents. [AM]
3 3. Arsenii Troepol’skii (1804–70) was an Orthodox spiritual writer of the Hesychast tradition. [AM]
4 4. Ignatii Brianchaninov (1807–67) was a theologian of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was canonized as a saint in 1988. [AM]
5 5. Feofan the Recluse (1815–94) was a bishop, theologian, and a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church (canonized in 1988). [AM]
6 6. Neprestanno molites’!, p. 143. [Russian editors]
7 7. Palama, Triady I, 1, 7. [Bibikhin] See Sv. Grigorii Palama, Triady v zash-chitu sviashchenno-bezmolvstvuiushchikh, tr. Vladimir Bibikhin (St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2014), p. 15. [O.E. Lebedeva]
8 8. The Way of a Pilgrim, p. 251. [Tr.]
9 9. This section is not in the English translation of The Way of a Pilgrim being used. See Otkrovennye rasskazy strannika dukhovnomu svoemu ottsu, ‘Prilozheniia. Tri kliucha ko vnutrennei molitvennoi sokrovishchnitse i svia-tootecheskie nastavleniia