V. SPIRITUAL EMPTINESS AND ENCOUNTER WITH THE LIVING GOD

We languish with spiritual thirst In the sultry desert I dragged on. From the poem by A. S. Pushkin "The Prophet"

What follows from all this? Or rather, since we are not concerned here with reasoning and theories, what have we come to? What do we have left and what should we live on?

All the idols whom we formerly enthusiastically served and whose service made our lives meaningful have lost their charm and cannot attract our souls, no matter how many people around us give them their strength. We have only a thirst for life—a life full, living, and deep, some of the last, deepest demands and desires of our spirit, of which we not only do not know how to satisfy them, but we do not even know how to express them.

For the negative result of our review of spiritual wanderings cannot satisfy us in any way. There was an era in our spiritual past when this negative result seemed like a great positive revelation to many of us. This is perhaps the last, most imperfect and lifeless idol that the soul meets on these paths. This is the ghost of complete, perfect personal freedom. We have already met with him and pointed out that, in comparison with the tyranny of moral norms; He seduces us with a hint of some truth in life. But this temptation is brief and too easily exposed as a lie; Only the most naïve, inexperienced souls can succumb to it for a while. To seek nothing, to serve nothing, to enjoy life, to take from it all that it can give, to satisfy every desire, every passion, to be strong and daring, to rule over life — this sometimes seems tempting; and, as has been pointed out, there was a brief epoch—it may be called the age of Nietzsche—when it seemed to many to be the supreme wisdom of life.

We do not need to refute this imaginary wisdom with any abstract arguments. I think it can be said of most of us that we are no longer the same and that this temptation does not work on us. Freedom from everything in the world – what good is it for us if we do not know what we are free for? Will it give us much, are all the pleasures and ecstasies that are given by the simple unbridled desires already so great? We are spiritually old and are skeptical not only of "ideals" but of all the so-called "blessings of life." We know well that every moment of happiness is more than redeemed by suffering or anguish of satiety; We know that there is more sorrow in life than happiness and joy, we have known poverty, we clearly see the inevitable end of all life — death, in the face of which everything becomes equally illusory. In short, we have too vivid a sense of the meaninglessness of life to be carried away by the bare process of life itself. And the word "freedom" in this sense seems to us even offensive and inappropriate. Is he free who, without meaning or purpose, wanders from side to side, wandering without a path, driven only by the desires of the moment, the meaninglessness of which he is well aware? Is he free who does not know where to escape from spiritual idleness and spiritual poverty? In the face of such "temptations", one involuntarily recalls with bitterness the old stupid, but symbolically significant witticism:

"Cabman, are you free?"

"Free."

"Well, then shout: long live freedom!"

A joyful enthusiasm for life, which transcends the usual boundaries and ordinary order, a genuine, always temporary, rapture with the revelry of passions, which proceeds not from despair, but from an excess of strength, is possible, apparently, only when in the depths of the soul there is a living faith in some ultimate stability and inviolability of life. Just as a child rages and rages, proceeding from a sense of the unshakable firmness of parental authority, the calm comfort of his home, and becomes unchildishly serious and quiet in a strange environment, when his soul is full of anxiety and vagueness, so all of us, experiencing the shaking of the spiritual ground under our feet, have lost the ability to be childlike careless, to dare to exuberant joy — to what the Germans call the untranslatable beautiful word "Uebermut" [7]. To enjoy joyful intoxication, you need to have a home and be sure that you can sober up peacefully in it. Otherwise, only rampant despair is possible, that bitter, heavy drunkenness to which Marmeladov indulges, because he has "nowhere to go."

What we seek and yearn for is not freedom, but strength and stability, not chaotic wandering through endless distances, but peace in our home. We are carried to the sides by the turbulent waves of life, and we dream of setting foot on an unshakably solid shore. Or, more precisely, we are hanging in the air above the abyss, because we have lost the inner connection of our spirit, our personality with being, and we want to restore this connection, to lean on solid spiritual ground. We suffer not from an excess, but from a lack of spiritual strength. We languish in the desert, our soul seeks not a meaningless expanse of detachment from everything, but, on the contrary, a close, final merging with something unknown, which can once and for all fill, strengthen, and saturate it.

Our souls became impoverished and starving. The loss of faith is not an easy matter, the overthrow of the idols whom we and our fathers have worshipped so long and passionately is not child's play. Probably, it was just as terrible, desolate and dreary for our ancestors, the ancient Slavs, when Perun descended into the Dnieper along with the rest of the idols, and they did not know whom to serve now and from whom to ask for help in troubles. For the renunciation of idols is not an impudent betrayal, it is not a rejection of faith and falling into a frenzy of impiety: it is a sign of a change of faiths, and if a new faith has not yet been found, then the fall of the old is itself a sign of a passionate search for it, of a painful longing for it.

Blessed is he who, in this anguish, in this torment of spiritual hunger and thirst, has a near, kindred soul, no matter whether it be a friend, a mother, or a wife, before whom he can pour out his anguish, or with whom he can at least take a break from it, for often we are unable to fully express to the person closest to us, but even to ourselves, what torments us. And woe to the lonely!