Every time one gets interested in something that seemed obvious, new aspects of this already known phenomenon open up and one discovers something completely new. While translating from English I recently discovered one such occurrence which I would like to discuss.
I had to translate the list of deadly sins, and it so happens that one of the sins cannot be literally translated, even though I always thought that the list of sins in catholic, protestant and orthodox traditions doesn't vary. This list was first put together by Pope Gregory the Great in the second half of the sixth century and included lust, gluttony, greediness, despondency, anger, envy and pride. But in English in place of despair/despondency (rus. уныние) stands laziness (sloth). Sometimes Russians also write "despair (laziness)", but you have to agree that it's not one and the same.
Historically they were connected, and the younger contemporary of Pope Gregory, St.John Climacus discussed these sins in one Word of his famous work "Ladder of Divine Ascent". However he speaks more about despondency than about laziness, assuming that "each of the other passions gets abolished by one, contrary virtue; however, despondency for the monk is absolute death." Laziness he recalls only in the statement "A brave soul can resurrect a dead mind; despair and laziness rob all these riches."
When I began to look at this, it appeared that the understanding of this particular sin (lat. acedia) has changed the most since the time when it was included in the list of deadly sins. Initially it meant grief and was understood as spiritual laziness, apathy, which leads to a person no longer enjoying the happiness of life, given to him by God. Thomas Aquinas (catholic saint of the thirteenth century), to whom goes back the modern understanding of the deadly sins, treated despondency as the "uneasiness of mind", which, in turn, leads to lesser sins - unbalanced state of mind, worry, trepidation.
Finally, with industrialisation of western civilization, this sin has begun to be understood literally as laziness, or inaction. Thus laziness became a deadly sin, but in our orthodox tradition it stayed as despair.
I think here lies one of the most important differences between Russian and Westeuropean mentalities. If we consider that the deadly sins are those that produce all other sins, then there is a big difference between the sins that are produced by despair, and those produced by laziness. Goncharov wrote with such warmth about Ilya Ilyich Oblomov! "At other times his glance would darken as with weariness or ennui. Yet neither the one nor the other expression could altogether banish from his countenance that gentleness which was the ruling, the fundamental, characteristic, not only of his features, but also of the spirit which lay beneath them. That spirit shone in his eyes, in his smile, and in his every movement of hand and head. On glancing casually at Oblomov a cold, a superficially observant person would have said, "Evidently he is good-natured, but a simpleton"; whereas a person of greater penetration and sympathy than the first would have prolonged his glance, and then gone on his way thoughtfully, and with a smile as though he were pleased with something."
Laziness prevents actions, but despair plagues the spirit. This is more frightful.
A Russian version of this article can be found here.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
On the void between reason and heart
In yesterday's edition of "Vecherka" there was my interview with Natalya Leonidovna Chubikina about the problem of waste and rubbish tips, which surround big cities in loops of smoke. Now almost everyone knows that the problem of pollution is one of the most impending. If we continue living as we do now, the generations to come won't have any space left to exist - our surroundings will become our displacement. On top of that, from what our space agencies tell us, we even managed to pollute in space. News report - "Our orbit is slowly becoming a dump for space waste, where sooner or later an area for satellites will cease to exist". But space there's lots of...
This problem bothers me also in a more general sense: the fact of the matter is, that people can't find harmony in their relationship with the environment, because they cannot find harmony within themselves. This is where philosophy begins. People throw out into nature everything that they have collected in their souls.
Animals stay in balance with their natural surroundings because this balance emerges on its own. If one species becomes too aggressive, it kills off the basis for it's own existence and dies off. If one pollutes the environment so much, then it needs to find a new area of habitation. But they're all already taken. There's nowhere else to go. There's no one else to blame but oneself.
Thanks to reason a person received the opportunity to organise life in a generous and lavish fashion. However the life of his reason hasn't found balance with the life of his heart. This is where the absence of harmony comes from. In the person's self, as well as in his relationship with others.
In the 19th century in Russia there lived a remarkable philosopher Pamfil Danilovich Urkevitch. In 1860 he published a book called "The heart and its meaning in the spiritual life of man as based on the word of God". In this work Pamfil Danilovich demonstrated that reason is the highest ability of spiritual life, but the root of spiritual life remains to be the heart. It is on the spiritual abilities of the heart that the moral pride of man is founded on.
Thus when we're following the tendencies of modern life and think that all problems (ours and those of others) can be solved by reason or science alone, we're wrong. A being in disharmony cannot bring anything into the world apart from its own disharmony. This is exactly what it brings. It suffers and brings.
One must say that Russian intelligentsia led by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky attacked Urkevitch, without even attempting to understand what he was saying. All this despite the fact that he was a professor of Moscow university. But the west-focused Russian intelligentsia always preferred to follow fashionable trends and theories, rather than free thought.
If Urkevitch was heard, then our relation to one another and to the environment would have been slightly different. The West also didn't hear a great scientist and deeply religious man Blaise Pascal and his “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know". "A thinking reed" (a man according to Pascal) became a tyrant. He threw life on earth under the feet of his comforts, but with that he failed to find spiritual happiness.
A Russian version of this article can be found here.
This problem bothers me also in a more general sense: the fact of the matter is, that people can't find harmony in their relationship with the environment, because they cannot find harmony within themselves. This is where philosophy begins. People throw out into nature everything that they have collected in their souls.
Animals stay in balance with their natural surroundings because this balance emerges on its own. If one species becomes too aggressive, it kills off the basis for it's own existence and dies off. If one pollutes the environment so much, then it needs to find a new area of habitation. But they're all already taken. There's nowhere else to go. There's no one else to blame but oneself.
Thanks to reason a person received the opportunity to organise life in a generous and lavish fashion. However the life of his reason hasn't found balance with the life of his heart. This is where the absence of harmony comes from. In the person's self, as well as in his relationship with others.
In the 19th century in Russia there lived a remarkable philosopher Pamfil Danilovich Urkevitch. In 1860 he published a book called "The heart and its meaning in the spiritual life of man as based on the word of God". In this work Pamfil Danilovich demonstrated that reason is the highest ability of spiritual life, but the root of spiritual life remains to be the heart. It is on the spiritual abilities of the heart that the moral pride of man is founded on.
Thus when we're following the tendencies of modern life and think that all problems (ours and those of others) can be solved by reason or science alone, we're wrong. A being in disharmony cannot bring anything into the world apart from its own disharmony. This is exactly what it brings. It suffers and brings.
One must say that Russian intelligentsia led by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky attacked Urkevitch, without even attempting to understand what he was saying. All this despite the fact that he was a professor of Moscow university. But the west-focused Russian intelligentsia always preferred to follow fashionable trends and theories, rather than free thought.
If Urkevitch was heard, then our relation to one another and to the environment would have been slightly different. The West also didn't hear a great scientist and deeply religious man Blaise Pascal and his “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know". "A thinking reed" (a man according to Pascal) became a tyrant. He threw life on earth under the feet of his comforts, but with that he failed to find spiritual happiness.
A Russian version of this article can be found here.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
"With fainting soul not athirst for Grace, to an exam I didn't wander..."
In Griboedov's "Woe from wit" there is a delightful character Skalozub, who says:
"I have good news: there is an education plan, I hear,
For boarding schools, Lyceums and gymnasiums,
They'll teach there simply, like they do it here.
They will use books on some occasions."
Skalozub was a simple person - as simple as a shoe. He himself would have been pleasantly surprised that in some two hundred years his words almost literally would come true.
In front of me is an Order about the specifics of conducting a state (final) certification, where with reference to an order of the Ministry of Education of Russia from 05.02.2008 N 36 and the order of Rosobrnadzor (The Federal Service for supervision in the sphere of education and science) from 16.01.2008 N 75 it says: "An exam in literature can be sat as an exam of choice".
Finally! How long can we torture our children with all these Pushkins and Tolstoys, Turgenevs and Chekhovs?! Let's also not forget the above mentioned Griboedov?! Enough!
So what does all this mean exactly? That the final exam in literature is no longer compulsory. If we consider the pragmatic attitude of modern youth...
Sometimes when I am examining students in cultural studies I ask them to name any three Russian composers. Only one in ten is able to name all three. Far from everyone remembers Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rakhmaninov. And I'm not even talking about Dargomijski or Taneev. Now it is literature's turn. I have already heard from students that "War and Peace" was written by Dostoevsky, and "Fathers and Sons" by Gogol.
When I was just starting to work at school, there was an order that Nekrasov's book "In the trenches of Stalingrad" has to be taken out of the school literature program. This was a singular prohibition. After N.K.Krupskaya, who in the 1920s excluded Plato, Dostoevsky and fairy tales out of school and higher education institution programs, everything was quietly reinstated. Then at some point Esenin would be prohibited, then someone else. Again it would be quietly reinstated. But Russian literature was still one of the core subjects in school education. Certainly, the greatest pride of our culture!
The knowledge of literature was already deteriorating through films that were based on the classics. This way watching a movie replaced reading ... Literature never had it easy.
It is obvious that not all masterpieces of Russian classics are understood by school students. But they are necessary nonetheless. Those, who will want to understand more in life will turn to these classics later, having some life experience. However if it's no longer compulsory to know them for an exam, and then the parents, who can't remember three Russian composers, said that it's boring as hell... All hope lies with those parents, who still remember.
A Russian version of this article can be found here.
"I have good news: there is an education plan, I hear,
For boarding schools, Lyceums and gymnasiums,
They'll teach there simply, like they do it here.
They will use books on some occasions."
Skalozub was a simple person - as simple as a shoe. He himself would have been pleasantly surprised that in some two hundred years his words almost literally would come true.
In front of me is an Order about the specifics of conducting a state (final) certification, where with reference to an order of the Ministry of Education of Russia from 05.02.2008 N 36 and the order of Rosobrnadzor (The Federal Service for supervision in the sphere of education and science) from 16.01.2008 N 75 it says: "An exam in literature can be sat as an exam of choice".
Finally! How long can we torture our children with all these Pushkins and Tolstoys, Turgenevs and Chekhovs?! Let's also not forget the above mentioned Griboedov?! Enough!
So what does all this mean exactly? That the final exam in literature is no longer compulsory. If we consider the pragmatic attitude of modern youth...
Sometimes when I am examining students in cultural studies I ask them to name any three Russian composers. Only one in ten is able to name all three. Far from everyone remembers Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rakhmaninov. And I'm not even talking about Dargomijski or Taneev. Now it is literature's turn. I have already heard from students that "War and Peace" was written by Dostoevsky, and "Fathers and Sons" by Gogol.
When I was just starting to work at school, there was an order that Nekrasov's book "In the trenches of Stalingrad" has to be taken out of the school literature program. This was a singular prohibition. After N.K.Krupskaya, who in the 1920s excluded Plato, Dostoevsky and fairy tales out of school and higher education institution programs, everything was quietly reinstated. Then at some point Esenin would be prohibited, then someone else. Again it would be quietly reinstated. But Russian literature was still one of the core subjects in school education. Certainly, the greatest pride of our culture!
The knowledge of literature was already deteriorating through films that were based on the classics. This way watching a movie replaced reading ... Literature never had it easy.
It is obvious that not all masterpieces of Russian classics are understood by school students. But they are necessary nonetheless. Those, who will want to understand more in life will turn to these classics later, having some life experience. However if it's no longer compulsory to know them for an exam, and then the parents, who can't remember three Russian composers, said that it's boring as hell... All hope lies with those parents, who still remember.
A Russian version of this article can be found here.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Man alone in the city
A modern city is a strange place where lonely people pass each other without notice. Sometime ago sociologist David Riesman wrote a book on the subject, with a title-diagnosis of "The Lonely Crowd". It's a common occurrence in a city to live for years in an apartment and not knowing who our neighbours are. This was impossible in a village setting. This catastrophic destruction of all connections happened in a historically incredible short amount of time - four generations, in which the village mentality of Russia became a city mentality.
We haven't had a chance to get used to it. Large families are all but gone. Each person is only related to a couple of relatives, and there's no use even beginning to talk about lonely old people or abandoned children... Instinctively people do everything in their power not to end up lonely, not to be alone with their thoughts. Better TV, better trash of "star" comedians, better soap operas, which are as identical as the conversations in queues of sick people. Better... Anything is better, as long as it takes the mind off oneself!
People are afraid of loneliness, because they feel that loneliness makes life pointless - it becomes useless. Then even the godly beauty of nature cannot save one from melancholy. According to the book 'Suicide' by Émile Durkheim, people commit suicide when all social networks are torn. Not wars or life's difficulties, not even sickness leads to it, rather above all loneliness and its ghosts. Even financially independent people are prepared to live with people they don't love, to suffer humiliations and offences, so long as they have someone nearby and feel that they're needed by someone at least. If it's not a person, then even a dog or a cat will do.
Very few people left alone with themselves are able to preserve their identity. But what about hermits who live many years in isolation? No, solitude does not mean loneliness. If it happens with the full sense of responsibility, then it actually leads to a feeling of calm and unity with the world.
This is a testament of a person who left the city and came to live on a shore of a lake, surviving on what he could get with his own hands - Henry Thoreau in the book 'Walden, or Life in the Woods': "Why should I feel lonely?...What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, ... where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue,..." This was written back in 19th century. Today we have polluted nature so, that finding a place which would allow us to forget about people and feel unity with nature and perennial source of life is getting increasingly difficult and it's frightening to leave our all accustomed comforts.
Cities are becoming brighter and more accommodating, apartments larger, but these are what's making those who live inside them more shallow, indifferent and one-dimensional. We're becoming smaller, proportionally opposite to the increasing population, and perhaps feeling this we don't want to increase the number of children. We have excessively more redundant words than our ancestors. Ads around us are metallically screeching above the growing void.
But the young ones are cherishing hope, and are right in doing so.
A Russian version of this article can be found here.
We haven't had a chance to get used to it. Large families are all but gone. Each person is only related to a couple of relatives, and there's no use even beginning to talk about lonely old people or abandoned children... Instinctively people do everything in their power not to end up lonely, not to be alone with their thoughts. Better TV, better trash of "star" comedians, better soap operas, which are as identical as the conversations in queues of sick people. Better... Anything is better, as long as it takes the mind off oneself!
People are afraid of loneliness, because they feel that loneliness makes life pointless - it becomes useless. Then even the godly beauty of nature cannot save one from melancholy. According to the book 'Suicide' by Émile Durkheim, people commit suicide when all social networks are torn. Not wars or life's difficulties, not even sickness leads to it, rather above all loneliness and its ghosts. Even financially independent people are prepared to live with people they don't love, to suffer humiliations and offences, so long as they have someone nearby and feel that they're needed by someone at least. If it's not a person, then even a dog or a cat will do.
Very few people left alone with themselves are able to preserve their identity. But what about hermits who live many years in isolation? No, solitude does not mean loneliness. If it happens with the full sense of responsibility, then it actually leads to a feeling of calm and unity with the world.
This is a testament of a person who left the city and came to live on a shore of a lake, surviving on what he could get with his own hands - Henry Thoreau in the book 'Walden, or Life in the Woods': "Why should I feel lonely?...What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, ... where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue,..." This was written back in 19th century. Today we have polluted nature so, that finding a place which would allow us to forget about people and feel unity with nature and perennial source of life is getting increasingly difficult and it's frightening to leave our all accustomed comforts.
Cities are becoming brighter and more accommodating, apartments larger, but these are what's making those who live inside them more shallow, indifferent and one-dimensional. We're becoming smaller, proportionally opposite to the increasing population, and perhaps feeling this we don't want to increase the number of children. We have excessively more redundant words than our ancestors. Ads around us are metallically screeching above the growing void.
But the young ones are cherishing hope, and are right in doing so.
A Russian version of this article can be found here.
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