VIRTUE ARISING REFRESHED

…How often, I wonder, can a key to the Russian mystery be found in a quote from Nietzsche? Quite often, I reply to myself…

This entry is not exactly about yet another Nietzschean prognostication concerning Russia, It is rather about a beautiful metaphor of his, which allows me to illuminate a very fine point in Russia’s regard.

Here is a line from Nietzsche’s Menschliches (83), where he uncannily stumbles upon the key to yet another deep Russian mystery:

“Sleep of virtue. When virtue has slept, it will arise refreshed.”

How many times has Russia been called a sleeping giant by her careful watchers? Imagine that giant as an eternal sinner, possessing mortal (but perpetually regenerating) flesh, taken over by sin, and thus deserving the great suffering, inflicted on her for her redemption, whereas her immortal soul is pure and virtuous, but that soul, that virtue, has been fast asleep deep inside her bosom.

Why is that virtue asleep? An analogy can be made here to the greatest folk hero of Russia’s legends, Ilya Muromets. For the first thirty years of his life, he was a helpless invalid, immobilized in his bed, on top of a warm Russian stove. After those thirty years, he rose up, fresh and all-powerful, and ready for great deeds.

Ilya Muromets has often been compared to Russia as a whole, but, being a paragon of strength and virtue, I might just as well liken him to the Russian soul. It is the soul, not the body, which is asleep. No wonder then that this ostensibly legendary folk hero has been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as one of her most venerated Saints, assuming, rather spuriously, the existence of a real person behind the folk legend.

Once again, why would the Russian soul be asleep? But why, then, would Ilya Muromets be lying prostrated on top of his stove, we may ask? The legend doesn’t say why, but a paraphrase from Shakespeare may serve as a tentative answer: "Tired with all this, for restful [...sleep] I cry…"

And here is my full answer, as applicable to this Russian mystery: Like Ilya Muromets, the Russian soul has been asleep, exhausted from the sinfulness of the body.

Such, in a deep mystical sense, was the rationale of the Russian Keepers of the Nation for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. They realized that the Russian National-Christian spirit, the mighty force of the Third Rome, was asleep in the nation, exhausted by the hypocrisy of the political power, which had turned Russia’s religion into a lap dog of the State, bringing to mind a weird variation on the Kierkegaardian skepticism concerning all established religions.

Unlike the great Dane’s concern that the established Church in Denmark (as anywhere else where religion is established) had been inevitably corrupted by its own political power, the Russian Church, under the Tsars, was completely powerless politically, but was overburdened by an illusion of its ineptitude, unable to achieve a balance between the tremendous power of the Orthodox religion and its own pathetic ineffectiveness and decay. As a result, the prestige of the Church had plummeted, while the prestige of the Orthodox faith was in the dumps as well. The Third Rome mission of Russia was in gravest jeopardy, and her soul, her virtue, needed to wake up from its long slumber!

(I must refer the reader to the most meaningful exchange, in this regard, between Stalin and the great writer Mikhail Bulgakov, presented in my yet unposted entry Stalin And Bulgakov’s White Guard, from which I’m now quoting just this one short passage:

Stalin loved Bulgakov and liked to talk to him, and personally protected him from persecution on account of his extremely unorthodox views and writings. On one particular occasion, when Bulgakov was bitterly complaining to him about religious persecution in the USSR, Stalin briefly commiserated with him, but then turned the tables on the writer in their historically memorable exchange. He reminded Bulgakov how before the Bolshevik Revolution Bulgakov used to be a religion-spurning atheist, and now look what our Revolution has done to you: It has turned you into a Russia-loving champion of Christian Orthodoxy!

Bulgakov was quick to get the point, and registered his stunned agreement with Stalin then and there.)

Considering the urgent necessity of a profound religious revival for Russia’s spiritual revival, the Keepers of the Russian Nation thus allowed the horrific shock of the Bolshevik Revolution, with its “added benefit” of a vicious religious persecution, to serve as a wakeup jolt for the long-sleeping Orthodox virtue, so that it could arise refreshed, and fulfill its historical mission. Considering that the Russian mind counts time in centuries, and not in modern Western media’s 24-hour news cycles, here is a veritable case of a mission accomplished, as evidenced by the tremendous role played by the Russian Orthodox Church in today’s political, spiritual, and cultural life of the Russian society.

Virtue has slept, and is arising refreshed…