Бесплатный фрагмент - Rilke and Tolstoy: Dialogues on God

…a person must understand and remember that God reveals Himself only directly to the human heart…

— Leo Tolstoy

You must know that God has been breathing through you from the very beginning, and if your heart glows, <…> it means He is creating within it.

— R. M. Rilke

Between Us Lies the Expanse of Eternity

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) were two outstanding visionaries and creators who, in their search for the meaning of life and immortality, followed different yet selfless paths. When they came “face to face” in 1900 at Yasnaya Polyana, their vastly different temperaments and convictions prevented them from reaching a mutual understanding. This is hardly surprising, for great souls need the expanse of eternity to truly recognize one another and speak the same language.

One can only guess at the content of their conversations at Yasnaya Polyana, but after more than a century, the unspokenness that arose between them has become all the more vital and eloquent.

To fill the gaping void left by that meeting, this publication is an attempt to reconstruct a possible conversation between Tolstoy and Rilke, with quotations from their works and letters as the sole guide.

Continuing the dialogues initiated in the book Rilke Alive. Tolstoy and Russia. Dialogues on Art, which centered on art, this collection embraces a broader range of topics, chief among them being faith and God.

*

Introductory Remarks

This publication does not aim to exhaustively explore the theme of God in the works of Rilke or Tolstoy. As an admirer of the genius of these two original artists, I am primarily interested in their spiritual experience, which emerges even more vividly and fully when one allows such dissimilar creators to engage in a speculative dialogue.

It is experience, not words, that unites these two great souls. For they share one abode: an illuminated mind and heart.

Therefore, I have tried to make each dialogue as clear in meaning as possible, though I must admit I did not always succeed. After all, even on specific issues, the views of Rilke and Tolstoy cannot be conveyed in a few words, let alone their entire worldviews.

Nevertheless, for a better understanding of the more “obscure” passages, especially in the concluding dialogues, the book includes a supplementary section containing two short pieces: Leo Tolstoy’s notoriously famous “creed,” which he articulated with utmost clarity in his 1901 response to the Synod, and a brief introduction to the “metaphysics” of the “late” Rilke from the period of his Duino Elegies.

*

From the Compiler and Translator

All the dialogues in this book are a product of my imagination, as we know nothing about the actual conversation at Yasnaya Polyana, other than that it concerned “the surrounding landscape, Russia, death…”

Rilke’s reflections in the dialogues are excerpts from his diaries and letters. These works are in the public domain. All quotations are given in my own translation from German. The Appendix contains two short quotations from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, translated by Jessie Lemont (1872 — 1947).

Tolstoy’s reflections are drawn from the following of his works: “The Christian Teaching,” “What Is My Faith,” “A Short Exposition of the Gospels,” and “The Harmony and Translation of the Four Gospels.” All quotations are provided in my own translation from Russian, preserving the stylistic and grammatical peculiarities of the original.

It is important to note that I have added selective formatting to the source texts: certain key words or phrases have been set by me on

separate lines,

thereby drawing the reader’s attention to them.

The illustrations in the book are fictional, created by me based on publicly available photographs from the early 20th century.

Vladislav Tsylyov

Dialogues

“God” and “gods”

Reflections by R.-M. Rilke (from a letter to Lotte Hepner, November 8, 1915) with commentary by L. Tolstoy

Rilke:

Does it disturb you that I say “God” and “gods” and, for good measure, pursue you with these dogmatic terms (like phantoms), thinking they will have some meaning for you?

Tolstoy:

Always, from the most ancient times, people have felt the misery, fragility, and meaninglessness of their existence and have sought salvation from this misery, fragility, and meaninglessness in a belief in a god or gods who could deliver them from the various calamities of this life and, in a future life, grant them the bliss they desired but could not obtain in this one.

Rilke:

…let us assume for a moment that a metaphysical realm exists. Let us agree that from the very beginning of his existence, man created gods in whom were contained all the deadened and threatening, deadly and terrifying elements of life — its violence, its rage, its superhuman frenzy, and that all these were bound into one tight knot of cruelty — something alien to us, if you will, and yet allowing us to admit that we were aware of it, endured it, and even accepted it for the sake of an undeniable, secret connection and involvement with it. For we, too, were like that; only we did not know what to do with this side of our experience…

Tolstoy:

And so, from the most ancient times, among different peoples, there have been different preachers who taught people about the nature of that god or those gods who could save them, and about what must be done to please this god or these gods in order to receive a reward in this life or the next.

Rilke:

...the gods were too great, too dangerous, too multifaceted; they grew beyond us, acquiring an inordinate significance; given the numerous demands of our lives, adapted to our habits and achievements, we found it impossible to deal with these unmanageable and incomprehensible forces; and so we agreed to place them outside of ourselves.

Tolstoy:

Some religious teachings taught that this god is the sun and is personified in various animals; others taught that the gods are the sky and the earth; a third group taught that God created the world and chose from all nations one beloved people; a fourth taught that there are many gods and that they participate in the affairs of men; a fifth taught that God, having taken the form of a man, descended to earth.

Rilke:

But since they [the gods] were an overflow of our own being, its most powerful element, extraordinarily powerful, immense, cruel, incomprehensible, often monstrous — how could they, concentrated in one place, not exert their influence on us, not demonstrate their might, and not dominate us? And, mind you, from now on from the outside.

Tolstoy:

And all these teachers, mixing truth with falsehood, demanded of people not only abstinence from acts considered evil and the performance of deeds considered good, but also sacraments, and sacrifices, and prayers, which more than anything else were supposed to ensure people’s well-being in this world and in the next.

<…> But the longer people lived, the less and less these doctrines satisfied the demands of the human soul.

Rilke:

Could one not treat the history of God as an almost never-explored region of the human soul, one that has always been set aside, preserved, and in the end, always neglected?

Not Faith, but the Heart’s Inclination

•

Reflections by R. M. Rilke (from a letter to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss, December 28, 1921) with commentary by L. Tolstoy

Rilke:

Faith! Such a concept simply does not exist — I almost said. There is only love. The heart’s compulsion to accept this or that as true, which we usually call faith, makes no sense at all.

Tolstoy:

…the reason of people raised in human society is never free from perversion. Every person raised in human society inevitably undergoes a perversion consisting of the deception of faith.

In my understanding, faith is the certainty of that foundation upon which all action of reason is built. Faith is the knowledge of revelation, without which it is impossible to live and think. Revelation is the knowledge of that which man cannot attain by reason, but which is brought forth by all of humanity from the origin of everything, which is hidden in infinity. Such, in my view, must be the quality of revelation that produces faith; and it is this that I seek in the tradition of Christ, and for this reason I approach it with the most rigorous demands of reason.

Rilke:

First of all, one must find God somewhere, feel him as infinitely, overwhelmingly, unconditionally present; then, whatever one feels towards him — fear, amazement, breathlessness, and finally, love — it will hardly matter.

Tolstoy:

…the meaning of life for each individual person <…> lies only in increasing love within oneself, <…> this increase of love leads the individual in this life to ever greater good, provides a greater good after death the more love there is in a person, and, more than anything else, contributes to the establishment of the Kingdom of God in the world…

Rilke:

But for faith, this obsessive striving for God, there is no place where one has begun with the discovery of God, and where one can no longer stop, no matter what stage one started from…

Tolstoy:

And therefore, the deception of faith is the foundation of all human sins and calamities. The deceptions of faith are what in the Gospel is called blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, about which it is said that this act cannot be forgiven, that is, it can never, in any life, fail to be ruinous.

•

Reflections by R. M. Rilke (from a letter to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss, December 28, 1921) with commentary by L. Tolstoy

Rilke:

And you, a Jewess by birth, with such a rich and direct experience of God, with such an ancient fear of God in your blood, it does not befit you to worry about “faith.” Simply feel His presence within you…

Tolstoy:

Jesus expressed the meaning of the Kingdom of God in the world with the words of the prophet Isaiah. The Kingdom of God is happiness for the unhappy, salvation for the suffering, light for the blind, freedom for the unfree. Jesus told his disciples that the kingdom of heaven is that from now on God will no longer be that unapproachable God he was before, but that from now on God will be in the world and in communion with people.

Rilke:

…and if He, Jehovah, wanted to be feared, it was only because in many cases there was no other way of contact between man and God but fear. For the fear of God is only, in a way, the shell of a state whose inner content has no taste of fear, but can ripen to the most inexpressible namelessness and sweetness for one who loses himself in it.

Tolstoy:

If God is in the world and in communion with people, then — what kind of God is this? Is it that creator God, sitting in the heavens, who appeared to the patriarchs and gave his law to Moses, a vengeful, cruel, and terrible God whom people knew and revered, or is this a different God?

Rilke [to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss]:

Do not forget, in your lineage is one of the greatest gods of creation, a God to whom one cannot become an adherent whenever one wishes, as with the Christian God, but a God to whom a person belongs through their people, because from time immemorial He was created and formed in their forefathers, so that every Jew was affirmed in Him (and in the one whom no one dares to name), eternally planted in Him by the root of his tongue!

Tolstoy:

Jesus, when speaking of the law, never meant the law of Moses, but the common and eternal law, the moral law of men. Jesus does not teach how to fulfill the provision of the Mosaic books concerning the oath, but teaches how to fulfill the eternal law, which forbids any oath. <…> Christ denies everything, absolutely all of the Jewish religious doctrine.

Rilke:

I feel an indescribable trust in those peoples who did not come to God through faith, but found God through their own tribal way of life — in their roots. For example, the Jews, the Arabs, to some extent the Orthodox Russians — and, in a different form, the peoples of the East and of ancient Mexico.

Tolstoy:

…the method of faith’s deception consists in this, <…> that there exists another, more reliable instrument of cognition [than reason]: the revelation of truth, transmitted by God directly to chosen people with certain signs, miracles, i.e., supernatural events confirming the faithfulness of the transmission. Jesus said: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise up a new, living temple to God.” And the Jews said: “How will you now make a new temple, when this one was built for forty-six years?” And Jesus said: “I speak to you of that which is more important than the temple.”

Rilke:

For them [these peoples], God is [their] origin, and therefore, also [their] future.

Tolstoy:

You would not say this if you understood what the prophet’s words mean: “I, God, do not rejoice in your sacrifices, but I rejoice in your love for one another.” The living temple is the entire world of God’s people when they love one another.

*

Reflections by R. M. Rilke (from a letter to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss, December 28, 1921) with commentary by Leo Tolstoy

Rilke:

[And yet] For others, He is something abstract, something from which these others flee or toward which they strive as complete strangers or as people who have become outcasts, and therefore they always need an intercessor, a mediator, one who will translate their blood, the babble of their blood, into the language of the Divine. What these peoples strive for is that very “faith”; they must persuade and accustom themselves to accept as truth what is authentic being for peoples descended from God, and for this reason, all religions of believers so easily slide into the extremes of ethics.

Tolstoy:

I ask you <…> to remember that what repels <…>, and what appears <…> to be superstition, is not the teaching of Christ; that Christ cannot be guilty of that monstrous tradition which has been attached to his teaching and passed off as Christianity…

Rilke:

Religion is something infinitely simple, artless. It is not knowledge, not the content of a feeling (for all this is inherent from the very beginning, when a person first enters into a relationship with life), it is not duty and not self-denial, nor is it prohibitions: but in the boundless expanse of the universe, it is a direction of the heart.

Tolstoy:

[Recently] I have come to see Christianity not as an exclusive divine revelation, not as a historical phenomenon — I see Christianity as a teaching that gives meaning to life. <…>

Rilke:

Whatever path a person may choose, he can stray from it to the right or to the left, stumble and fall, and rise again; he can do wrong to some and suffer injustice from others; here he was treated cruelly, and there he himself harbored malice, became cruel and unjust — all this passes into the great religions, preserving and enriching God, who is their center.

Tolstoy:

I found myself in the position of a person who had received a sack of foul-smelling mud, and only after a long struggle and effort discovered that the sack truly contained priceless pearls, buried in the dirt. And I realized that I was not at all to blame for my disgust at the stinking mud, and that those people who had gathered and stored this pearl along with the mud were not only not to blame, but were worthy of love and respect.

Rilke:

Even someone dwelling on the outermost edge of this circle is still part of this potent center, despite having faced it only once, perhaps only in their final moments.

Tolstoy:

I did not know the light; I thought there was no light of truth in life. But, having become convinced that people live only by this light, I began to seek its source and found it in the Gospel, despite the false interpretation of the churches. And, having reached this source of light, I was blinded by it and received complete answers to the questions about the meaning of life…

Rilke:

…the originally known God makes no distinction between good and evil in relation to people, but acts for His own sake, passionately concerned only that they be near Him, hold onto Him, and belong to Him, and nothing else!

Tolstoy:

…the prophet Isaiah said:

The house of God is not the temple in Jerusalem, but the entire world of God’s people.

To Keep Oneself from the Idols of Faith

Reflections of Leo Tolstoy with commentary by R. M. Rilke (excerpts from a letter to Alexandre Benois, July 28, 1901)

Tolstoy:

The essence of the deception of faith lies in the deliberate confusion and substitution of the concepts of faith and trust: it is asserted that a person cannot live and think without faith, which is perfectly true, and in place of the concept of faith — that is, the recognition that something exists which is cognized but cannot be defined by reason, such as God, the soul, goodness — is substituted the concept of trust in the existence of a specific God, one in three persons, who created the world at a certain time, and revealed certain things to people, in a specific place, at a specific time, and through specific prophets.

Rilke:

I possess no philosophical training or experience, and so throughout my life, whatever philosophy I have encountered, I have always treated it as poetry, placing the highest aesthetic demands upon it and showing insufficient adherence and conscientiousness. Therefore, only one side of the works of most philosophers is accessible to me, and I admit I am completely incapable of grasping any system in its entirety and comparing it with another.

Tolstoy:

In order to free oneself from the deceptions of faith in general, a person must understand and remember that the only instrument of cognition he possesses is his reason, and that therefore any sermon asserting something contrary to reason is a deception, an attempt to eliminate the only instrument of cognition given to man by God.

Rilke:

Every time philosophy becomes a religion — that is, when it begins to impose its dogmas on others — one feels a certain manifestation of haste, of prematurity, even though, in any case, it represents only the grandiose path of its founder, a path along which he lived and struggled between life and death.

Tolstoy: