The Old Rectory
17th March 1969
Saint Sophrony the Athonite.
From the word 'homage' or 'cult' (having in mind the cult paid to a
divinity), comes the word 'culture' . And now culture has all but disappeared
from the face of the earth, and so called 'technical civilisation' is
impudently stealing into its place with unreserved pretension. Oh, I cannot
deny that this civilisation is indispensable for the very physical survival of
a population so multiplied. But I am not sure that the development, or
progress, of a civilisation must be ontologically linked with the loss or
diminution of people's spiritual quality. What is natural and understandable is
that a civilisation (which is something completely different from culture)
bound up with the idea of and the striving for the satisfaction of the
[material] needs of the many millions of people of our time, inevitably leads
to vulgarisation. But again, I would say that this does not yet mean that such
a pandemic spiritual fall is also inevitable. So, dear Maria, struggle for your
spiritual life amid this general confusion, this darkness that has covered the
earth.
Towards the end of the forties an exceptional Russian man wrote to
me from America. He wondered whether spiritual recovery is possible for the
American people (whom he had grown to love) without catastrophes. In those
years the Americans, or in any case the vast majority of them, were intoxicated
with victory and the influx of incalculable riches, and they considered their
way of life better, and began to conceive the idea of forcing it upon the
entire world; and by an unalterable spiritual law, after pride followed moral
decline; surfeiting beyond measure, the withdrawal of grace, the loss of the meaning
of life. Some of them, immeasurably over-satiated, considered themselves gods,
while others, blinded by envy of these gods, revolted, with the result that
almost everywhere in America criminality is growing, and no one dares to go
outside in the evening. Can you imagine what a pleasure this is? This doesn't
apply only to America, but to the whole world as well. The question arises: can
there be a spiritual recovery without catastrophes? In his time the madman
Hitler rejected Christianity as 'a religion for slaves' . His ideal became the
'superman' of Nietzsche, another madman, who 'prophetically' proclaimed the
'death of God' . But it goes further than that. The question is how, by what
means, to make people understand that humility is a Divine characteristic, an
attribute of Divine Love which gives itself without measure, beyond compare,
unreservedly. Love and humility - these two are one. Without humility, outside
of humility, there is no love and there can be none.
A dreadful sickness has struck the people of our time, a spiritual
colour-blindness: they see in colours diametrically opposed to true reality.
And when they see 'green' instead of 'red', they are sure that they are seeing
properly, and they have begun to consider normal people as sick people and lunatics.
So, dear Maria, for decades I have besought God to give peace to
the whole world, to give that peace which brings to the soul the indubitable
certainty - even though it cannot be proven to others - of the touch of
eternity, of the impossibility of death for our spirit, and the knowledge of
the inevitability of the victory of Good.
Reference:
Letters to his
family.Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov. 2015.