THE BLESSEDNESS OF SUFFERING

There are a number of different criteria, under which Russia qualifies for the mantle of the Third Rome, but none among them qualifies her so instantly and so categorically as the idea of the blessedness of suffering, deeply and naturally rooted inside the Russian national psyche.

The blessedness of suffering, the Christian duty and mission to accept the suffering, ‘prinyat’ stradaniye,’ as the Russians say, is a concept particularly akin to the martyrdom spirit of Early Christianity, and in this spiritual affinity with the purest form of Christianity that ever existed, Russia finds her legitimacy to be the ultimate moral leader of the Christendom.

It is important, however, to emphasize the passive nature of the Russian acceptance of suffering, as opposed to the active seeking of suffering, characterizing the missionary spirit of the Early Christianity. This is not to suggest that the active form is absent in the Russian tradition. Anyone who has read Dostoyevsky’s greatest novels or, say, Tolstoy’s Christian-philosophical works, such as Voskresenie (Resurrection), will find there an active desire to take the suffering as a punishment for sin (sometimes a deliberate sin is perpetrated, just to invite the punishment), so that through the triple act of public confession, repentance, and punishment in this world, redemption can be achieved, and eternal salvation eventually obtained.

As an interesting nuance, it might fascinate the historians of the American-Soviet confrontation during the official cold war era that the Russians never sought military superiority over the United States, not because it was either prohibitively expensive or totally impossible to achieve, but because it was unnecessary. Their reasoning was that simple military parity, symmetrical or asymmetrical, was already sufficient for overall superiority, for the Russian capacity to endure the suffering of war was incomparably superior to any other nation’s, and most certainly that of the United States. (In more down-to-earth terms, Americans, being so much richer than the Russians, had, all other things equal, far more to lose.) This fact, of course, has more than a historical value. Today’s Russo-American confrontation may be spinned differently than it was done before, but in reality, it is no less significant than the superpower rivalry of the cold war years, and the same concerns as before will have to apply, whether one wants it or not.

And finally, as promised, here is Nietzsche speaking in defense and in glorification of suffering as such, in Jenseits 225.The passage comes from Part Seven: Our Virtues, which means that he sees suffering as man’s main road to virtue.

"You want to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Wellbeing as you understand it--- that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible--- that makes his destruction desirable… The discipline of suffering, of great suffering, do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? The tension of the soul in unhappiness that cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, and greatness, was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man, creature and creator are united… And your pity is for the creature in man, for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified--- that which necessarily must and should suffer?"

(Anyone who has just read this passage with attention need not wonder anymore why the authentic Russian thinkers have always felt such a great affinity with Nietzsche!)

Here is perhaps our strongest philosophical testimony, on behalf of the defense, in the trial of Why Russia is indeed important. Paradoxically, it is the Orthodox Christian faith aspect that defines the Russian positive attitude to suffering, whereas Nietzsche’s apologia of suffering, within the creator-creature paradigm, goes hand in hand with his rejection of the Christian concept of suffering. These two motivations are ostensibly mutually exclusive, but the results, in both these cases, are identical. While it is grotesquely inconceivable that Nietzsche himself should suddenly become a champion of Christian suffering, I can only assume that, just as in the case of his creative child, he is ascending that same high mountain that the Orthodox Christian Russia does, but along his own path of the lonely genius, only to find that at the top all great religions and great philosophies are bound to meet, and there finally discover the great secret that, although they had all climbed differently, yet they all have reached the same summit.

As for Russia herself, here is yet another repudiation of the New Christianity philosophers of the early 20th century, Merezhkovsky et alia, who promoted their enlightened alternative to Russia’s glum glorification of suffering, in reconstituting corpus Russicus by attaching the head of Christ (after all, Russia was to remain a Christian nation!) to the body of Apollo. The Creator would thus stay as before, but the Creature would be transformed into an unsuffering, self-loving co-Deity. Guess what the result of this would have been?! Say good-bye to Nietzsche’s discipline of suffering, great suffering, and, together with it, to profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, and greatness… Indeed, here is where Merezhkovsky had gone wrong. Although one cannot deny him his native Russianness, his New Christianity reveals a deep confusion and a hard deadlock, which only the Bolshevik Revolution could overpower with its sword, like Gordius and his knot.

And thus, here is the profoundly compelling validation of my controversial thesis, for which I have received no applause from my befuddled American audiences, that the infamous Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was never a tragic aberration in the course of Russian history, but a deliberate self-inflicted wound, in harmony with the national urge to take the great suffering, and the blessing that comes with it.