The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Then I began to reason somewhat differently. Of course, the difference between man and God is infinitely greater than the difference between an ant and man. And it’s true that an ant can never comprehend man, just as man cannot conceive the psychology of an ant. But man did not create ants. He himself, the same as ants, was created by God. So why couldn’t God understand His creations? After all, to understand something does not mean to become identical with it. So just maybe, religion is a case of God coming down to man’s level to show him how he ought to live, so that humanity would be better off. The same way we tell children that they shouldn’t play with matches.

In a similar fashion I came gradually to approach the notion of immortality. Well, fine, we die and our body rots, but what about our thoughts and feelings? Surely it cannot be that our thoughts and deeds, our commands to our body, our will and mind, originate in the dead gray matter in our heads— matter which we have named, the composition of which we know and can discuss. What is thought, after all? Something immaterial. You can’t touch or weigh it. And how can something material create the immaterial?

Then I considered that we have something in us that does not decay, because it is not subject to decay. And that this something neither dies nor is born, because birth and death are material categories. Can that which cannot be felt, weighed or measured be born? Are molecules born and do they die?

I no longer believed the theory of evolution.

“Evolution exists, but within certain limitations,” I decided. Certain muscles can be developed with protracted, regular exercise. But no matter how long you flap your arms, even for a million years, they will never become wings—that I could not believe. That would be a miracle, and what miracles can there be without God?

I was now ready for religion, but which was the true one? For truth must be singular, and there are many religions.

Valerii Leviatov, My Path to God

279

Together with the appearance and development of my belief in God and immortality, I was becoming more and more drawn to Christianity, largely under the influence of Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

I was struck by The Humiliated and Insulted, the first novel by Dostoevsky that I read. Everything I had read prior to that seemed either a saccharine depiction of life, or hopeless despair. While here I saw a life full of suffering, people who were humiliated and insulted; yet when I turned the last page, I was filled with joy. These degraded and abused people were not alone; they loved each other and helped others like themselves, or even those more humbled than themselves. These people did not place their faith in any bright future for society, but in God; they loved not society in the abstract, but people as they were. Life was difficult for them, but they were not unhappy.

What makes man unhappy? Wanting something for himself that he is not granted. Others, who also want something for themselves, don’t let him have what he wants, and they in turn also suffer. But what if you are able to forget yourself? To uproot your selfishness, and to make the happiness of others your purpose in life? If your guiding principle becomes not “take,” but “give,” then your happiness will depend on how much good you give others. And this depends, not on fate, but upon you yourself. And misfortunes won’t be able to make you unhappy, because your own injuries won’t matter to you.

With a guiding principle such as this, a person can be happy in the face of any social injustice, inequality, and so on. He won’t be bothered by the fact that others live better than he does—he will be glad for them.