The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 3/Chapter 6
On the quay at Alexandria flocks of Russian peasant pilgrims with great bundles on their backs, men and women who had been in Jerusalem when the Great War broke out, or at Mount Sinai in the desert seeking remote shrines and holy men. As Smerdyakof said, "No one in these days can move mountains into the sea by faith, unless perhaps one man in the world, or at most two, and they most likely saving their souls in secret somewhere in the Egyptian desert"; and the peasant pilgrim, through the traditions of his Church, always looks to these deserts for spiritual power.
Besides the Christian pilgrims are hundreds of refugee Jews driven out of Zion by the belligerent Turk, many of them patriarchal types of great piety, long-bearded men with multiplex wrinkles on their brows.
My ship goes riding over the sea to Greece, passing the seven churches, those candles lit in the dim dawn of Christianity, passing Cyprus and Patmos and a thousand nameless islands where lived mystics, hermits, and writers of the early Church. We carried ikons brought from Jerusalem to be carried back to Russia. The pilgrims sang Christian hymns; the Jewish patriarchs, with phylacteries on their brows, read the Mosaic books and the prophets. Nearly every one on the boat was bound for Russia. We went thither the way these things have ever gone, from the desert northward over the sea. Not in vain does the reader of the Gospel stand facing the north; not in vain is the belfry of the cathedral built on the northern side. The direct message of Christianity has been the message that has gone northward.
The cathedral of Christianity, our St. Sophia in large, may perhaps be imagined in this guise.
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Egypt is the choir of the cathedral where stand the martyrs and the saints singing in white robes. Through the gates at the north and the west come those who hear the sweet tidings and the heavenly music.
The journey from Egypt to Russia is like going across our great Sophia from the splendid choir to the multitudes who have come out of the forests to listen.
Christianity went over the waves to Athos and Tsargrad, to the Greek and Roman cities of the Black Sea shores, and up the mighty rivers to Kief and Novgorod and Yaroslaf, down the great Volga, driving the Tartar before it, across the forests and along the rivers where lived the primeval nature-worshippers of Russia, brought by knights in armour, by priests and bishops, engendered by hermits and martyrs, enforced eventually by princes and monarchs, interwoven with the splendour of mediæval chivalry. Russia became officially Christian in 988, when King Vladimir and his hosts were baptized in the Dnieper at Kief. A cathedral of St. Sophia, "mother of Russian churches," springs up at Kief, St. Sophia appears at Novgorod, St. Sophia at Yaroslaf. At the time of our Edward the Confessor Russia was as fervently Christian as England. And the seed, no doubt, had sunk deeper or had been wafted into remoter solitudes. There was room in Russia for Christianity to mature in the popular mind.
At last the Turks streamed across the Levant, and severed the Christian world in two. Foolish and naïve Mahomet came stamping into the great cathedral of Sophia on horseback, shouting out at the foot of the sublime altar, "There is no god but God, and Mahomet is His prophet." Legend says that on that day a priest was celebrating Mass at the altar, and he prayed that the body of Christ might be saved from profanation. As an answer to his prayer the stones gaped, and priest and Host were enclosed, as the relics had been that in earlier days were placed between the tenth stones. The priest was probably murdered as he broke the bread, and, it is true, he has been taken into the wall and has become part of the Bride.
Leopards have their dens where Christian hermits once prayed to God, and they do not know that the ground is holy ground. And the ferocious yet simple Turk has it not in his power to profane Sancta Sophia. When the time comes he can be driven back to the wilds whence he came.
Constantinople falls. But Christianity does not fall, rather it grows. Russian Christianity is saved from much ecclesiastical exploitation, Levantine corruption, and materialism by the severance of the earthly tie, the break-up of the patriarchate of Tsargrad. After the Turks took Constantinople Russian Christianity was fed by the angels. Hence its fair face to-day.
Over the sea to Russia, to the Kremlins round the many-domed churches, to the gleaming ikons, to the great choruses, resplendent and triumphant Orthodoxy; to the land where ever day and night there is witness, where the young men see visions and the old men dream dreams; to Kief, to Novgorod, to Moscow, to the Kremlin, to the great pink-walled hill that stands above the mother-city crowned with churches. Bowing at the Ilinskaya, baring the head to enter at the Spassky Gate . . . my eyes rest on the wan wall of St. John the Great. I climb to the belfry and let my fingers pass lovingly over the bulging bells. I light a candle in the cathedral of the Assumption. I walk across the broad open spaces where Napoleon's cannon are ranged and listen to the sad slow chime of the Kremlin clock giving the hours and the quarters. Here again is a holy city standing above a merely worldly city, this walled hill over commercial Moscow, this Sophia exalted above Prudentia.
In the first autumn of the War, when I was at Moscow, I used to go to the Kremlin last thing each night. They were beautifully starry and peaceful nights. The churches and the low pavements that wander among the cobbles were flooded with silver, the toothed battlements and antediluvian old towers of the Kremlin walls seemed gigantically exaggerated in silhouette, and yet, though exaggerated, in a way truer, as if the ordinary vision of them we had by day was not correct, as if they were really in themselves of enormous importance and correspondingly enormous proportions. The moat of the Moscow river lay murky below, and afar among the vast congregation of the houses of the city a lamp burned here and there as if before votive shrines. Motionless sentries stood in front of the cathedrals. One's own steps echoed startlingly. The single liquid melody of the Kremlin chime broke out and poured away—ding, ding, ding, ding, dong, dell, dell. Holy Russia was watching.
I went into a cathedral: still many candles were burning. I walked along the walls: lamps were alight before holy pictures set in the old bricks. There was a perfect stillness and serenity. I paused, and the mind went across Moscow and beyond it fifteen hundred miles to Poland and Germany and Austria where was another scene, a more exterior scene and manifestation of the life of Russia,—Russia in arms against a false ideal. Russia was serene though Russia was in deadly struggle. The heart was beating faithfully, strong hands were smiting the foe.
In the night the hundreds of Napoleon's black cannon had a sinister aspect, each one seemed pointed at me. The mind went back to their real hour of history when from them death blazed forth; when instead of this stillness and serenity the thunder and tumult of battle was around them. They are death's heads of what once were live guns; they are greedy as death, menacing as death—harmless also as death. Away above them among the glittering stars stand the gold crosses of the churches, the splendour of God. The mind's eye takes in hundreds and thousands of gold crosses, waving, dipping, lifting, triumphant, the grand processional aspect of the Church. Even at this moment how many are dying, how many souls are passing. In the Kremlin in the still night Holy Russia is watching. Away on the battlefields the brave are dying. Look, in the Kremlin you see their crosses among the stars; listen, you hear the heavenly chorus swelling as they join the great procession of the Church.
•••••••
From Egypt to Russia, and then from Russia West once more to England. The tempestuous War still rages, and in the seasons of history it is deep winter. Ravenous winds lash the bare trees, howl through the churchyards. Or the wind dies down awhile and bitter frost sets in, and the merciless hungry stars stare at the dead earth. Or heavy clouds come over and the snow sifts down, becomes deeper, communes with the breeze, wreathes itself in fantastic drifts. On the still branches of the forest the snow is balanced, or only disturbed by ravens flitting awkwardly from one tree to another. It is the winter of history, but the season will change. Under the crusted streams the water is flowing, flowers are rising under the snow, flowers from the living seed. The seed lives through the four seasons, and the seed is the Word of God.