March Monthly Reading: From "Whom to Serve?"

We know that in ancient times people worshipped idols. If, for example, there was a crop failure, people thought there was a special god of harvest who had been offended for some reason, and that therefore he must be appeased, and people made an idol from wood, called it the god of harvest, bowed down to it and brought sacrifices. And when a good harvest followed, people thought it was because they had prayed to the idol and brought it sacrifices. But we now know that the ancient people were deceived; now we know that there is a God who reveals Himself to man through reason in the laws of life, but that there is no special god of harvest, that nothing good could come from bowing and bringing sacrifices to a product of their own human manufacture, and that if a good harvest did follow, it happened according to the order of world life of which those people had no conception. This we now know, but we do not know that we are still deceived, and with even greater humiliation worship and bring incomparably greater sacrifices—all still to that same human manufacture. The only difference is that ancient people worshipped a material product, while we worship an invention. We, people of today, have made for ourselves various churches, various faiths—and all of them the most orthodox and true-believing—we have made many states and planted kings in them, invented governments, governorships, district councils, and planted in them ministers, governors, chairmen, members, and various officials, whose name, like that of the Gadarene demons, is legion. People have made for themselves so many objects of worship and sacrifice that one cannot take a step without running into some idol. And people believe that all these institutions, all these idols are necessary, and they humble themselves to the last degree in worship and bring as sacrifice not only everything they have but even themselves, imagining that some profit will come from this. But there is no actual profit; and if we are still somehow breathing, it is certainly not because we have many various sacred social institutions, but in spite of this—not all the laws of life have yet been replaced, the true God still lives in people.

The deception consists in the fact that the inner power of our own direct understanding and relation to God is outwardly and forcibly diminished in our life and stolen by substituting all possible social institutions for it; or in the fact that some people, being in reality the same as everyone else, have invented exalting their sinful, anti-human, bestial work of violence into a sacred right, and using this invention have appropriated for themselves a position of exclusive rationality and an imaginary representation before God.

This worldly deception, from which we can in no way come to our senses, began long ago, in the Old Testament itself. From the Old Testament we know that the Jews, among whom Christ appeared (whose faith, we boast, we supposedly profess)—the Jews differed from all other peoples in that they worshipped the true God, that worship of the true God was expressed not in any humiliating and ruinous actions, such as bowing one’s head to the ground, renouncing one’s will, conscience, human dignity, one’s entire life to the last drop of blood, as we now do before our gods—but that worship of the true God consisted in people fulfilling the laws of life expressed for the Jew in the ten commandments, of which the first speaks of the need for people to know the true God and not make for themselves any other gods; in this consisted the first, distinguishing quality of the people of God.

But the Jews, as a people of their time, could not constantly maintain themselves at that height of life to which they had been so inimitably raised by Moses; little by little they were tempted, fell, worshipped foreign gods, and through this their life became disordered, unbearably calamitous, and they repented and returned to the true God; but they destroyed their Jewish good completely and irretrievably by making for themselves an idol—an invention.

Chapter eight of the First Book of Samuel tells how the elders of Israel gathered to the prophet Samuel and demanded that he give them a king. The Scripture relates that these words of the people displeased the prophet Samuel, and he inquired of the Lord, and the Lord answered him with a great eternal word. He said: “They have not rejected you, but have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. So what is to be done if they have rejected me; they have done this not for the first time. Hearken unto the voice of the people, give them a king, only represent and declare to them the rights of the king who will reign over them.” And Samuel spoke to the people: “He will take your sons and your daughters and your best lands and give them to his servants, and you yourselves will be his slaves, and you will cry out then because of your king, and the Lord will not answer you then. The Lord your God is your King!” But the people did not listen, and Samuel gave them a king. Thus Israel rejected and lost the freedom given him by God through Moses, for which He had led him out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Before this, in the Book of Judges and in the Book of Ruth, it was written: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” But under a king, this order ceased: everyone stopped doing what he found right and did not seek what was right or wrong, because there was a king for that. Perhaps it seems better that way, but however wise kings may be and however perfect their laws, they can never replace the living reason within man, and one cannot allow both, because one crowds out and destroys the other, and because “no man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other.”

Thus with the king began in the Old Testament the worldly deception that has tormented the Jewish people for thousands of years and from which we other thousands of years cannot come to our senses.

—Buka

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Translator’s Notes:

• The reference to the “Gadarene demons” is to the story in Mark 5:9, Luke 8:30, where a demon possessing a man says “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
• The quotation from 1 Samuel 8 was particularly significant for Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans, who saw it as biblical warrant for anarchism—God’s preference for direct spiritual rule over human political institutions.
• This excerpt is from Chapter III of Arkhangelsky’s book.