Saint Ignatius and the problem of creativity

All beauty, both visible and invisible, must be anointed with the Spirit; without this anointing, it bears the stamp of corruption. From a letter from St. Ignatius to K. P. Bryullov 1 “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4), said the Lord. Indeed, the word of God is our precious, saving food. Is a word of art capable of nourishing a person’s soul? And what is this food, does it help spiritual growth, or, on the contrary, does it contain poison? What place does artistic creativity occupy in achieving the main Christian goal - enlightenment, deification, salvation of the soul? The problem of the relationship between the church worldview and artistic creativity arose with the beginning of the New Age, when the paths of the Church and the paths of culture decisively diverged. Such questions were not faced by the contemporaries of St. Andrei Rublev, who created icons in fasting and prayer, reflecting the heavenly world of spiritual realities, not bringing anything “from himself,” but carefully listening to Eternity. Today you can find a variety of points of view on this problem. It is clear that when apologists for the absolute value of worldly culture are people who are themselves involved in this area, in their reasoning we often find complete acceptance of everything coming from the pen of the artist-“demiurge”, “creator-co-worker of God.” Most consistently, such a view was expressed by Nikolai Berdyaev, who spoke about the deadening of modern Christianity, paralyzing creativity, and who based his religious philosophy on the cult of creativity as a force that justifies “The creative act is self-revelation and self-worth, without external judgment,” he wrote, arguing that “the cult of holiness must be complemented by the cult of genius” and that “art can be the atonement of sin” 2. Surprisingly, such views are also developed in the works of some church officials. “creativity, in essence, is... our assimilation... God,” and calls for abandoning the superstitious fear of the possible demonic nature of creativity, for “true creation is always from God, even if the author himself does not realize this and even if we sometimes find it seductive and wicked.” Moreover, from the author’s reasoning we can conclude that creative energy is essentially equated with the cleansing power of Divine grace. “The state of creative ecstasy,” he writes, “is a state of deification, and in this state it is no longer man who creates, but the God-man (? - A.L.),” and therefore Pushkin’s personal weaknesses and sins “ceased to exist, they burned in the cleansing fire of creativity, just as the sins of holy ascetics burn out in their feat of prayer” 3. That is, it turns out like this: if you want to be saved, then pray and repent, and if this is difficult, then you can bring yourself to creative ecstasy and write one or two “Gabriiliads” (only to the laymen they will seem wicked and seductive, but in fact they are “true creations”), and in this creative flame all your sins will burn! On the other hand, Schema-Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov), also our contemporary, in his book “Elder Silouan” entitled an entire chapter “On the four types of imagination and on the ascetic struggle against them.” The author states: “The world of human will and imagination is a world of “ghosts” of truth. Man has this world in common with fallen demons, and therefore imagination is a conductor of demonic energy.” In order to achieve true theology and a truly God-pleasing life, it is necessary to overcome such types of manifestation of the imagination as artistic creativity, scientific work, and philosophical quest: “Divine contemplations are given to a person not when he seeks them, and it is precisely for them, but when the soul descends into the hell of repentance and really feels worse than every creature” 4. So what exactly is a creative person from a Christian point of view? Does the Orthodox Church have a clear, intelligible, definite view on the problem of creativity? Yes, such a view exists, it is expressed through the Holy Fathers, ascetics of faith and piety. Separate judgments on this topic are found, for example, among the Optina elders. But among the Holy Fathers who have shone forth in modern times, Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov) developed the question that interests us most fully and comprehensively. Vladyka Ignatius, closely connected with the world of Russian culture, was himself a creatively gifted person: his literary and poetic talents attracted the attention of Pushkin, Krylov, Batyushkov, and Gnedich. Subsequently, Glinka, Bryullov, and Turchaninov were the Saint’s friends and correspondents. In the works and letters of the Master we find judgments concerning all types of artistic creativity. The Vladyka returns the words “artistic talent” and “talent”, which have become rather worn out, to their original meaning. He writes: “All God’s gifts to man are worthy of respect. The gift of speech undoubtedly belongs to the greatest gifts. By this man is likened to God, who has His Word.” Why is talent given to a person? “The divine purpose of the word in writers, in all teachers, and especially in shepherds is the instruction and salvation of people. What a terrible answer will be given by those who turned the means of edification and salvation into a means of corruption and destruction! 5 This gift is conceived by the Lord as the ability to clearly express thoughts, as mastery of the form and technique of speech. It should not be confused with “inspiration”, which gives rise to certain specific experiences, images, paintings in the artist. The source of this inspiration is very often far from divine. Through all the creations of the Master there runs the idea of ​​the “fallenness” of human nature, of man’s infection with sin, cleansing from which through prayer and repentance is the main goal of a Christian’s efforts. The Saint’s thought is simple and clear: as long as good and evil, light and dark live in the artist’s soul, everything that comes from his pen inevitably bears the imprint of unlived sin and unconquered passions. Let us recall the classic lines spoken about Gogol’s book, but applicable, of course, to any work of art: “...First purification by the Truth, and then enlightenment by the Spirit. True, a person also has an innate inspiration, more or less developed, arising from the movement of the feelings of the heart. Truth rejects this inspiration as mixed and mortifies it, so that the Spirit, coming, resurrects it in a renewed state. If a person, before purification by the Truth, is guided by his inspiration, then he will emit for himself and for others not pure light, but mixed, deceptive, because in his heart lives not simple good, but good mixed with evil...” 6 In Bishop Ignatius’s reflections on worldly culture, two points clearly stand out: firstly, culture succeeded in depicting evil and passions and, secondly, it turned out to be unable to adequately reflect spiritual realities. The Bishop writes: “People gifted by nature with talent do not understand why they were given the gift, and there is no one to explain it to them. Evil in nature, especially in man, is so disguised that the painful pleasure in it captivates the young artist, and he indulges in lies, covered with the guise of truth, with all the fervor of his heart. Most of the talents sought to depict human passions in luxury. Evil is depicted by singers, depicted by painters, depicted by music in all possible variety. Human talent, in all its strength and unfortunate beauty, developed in the depiction of evil; in depicting goodness, he is generally weak, pale, and tense” 7. Worldly culture, in addition, turns out to be unable to give a person a true idea of ​​the world and existence, which is especially noticeable when it tries to talk about spiritual realities. An artist who is unable or unwilling to accept the Christian worldview, dogma, anthropology, replaces them with his own interpretations and, thus, replaces the reflection of God’s world with pictures of an illusory, invented, invented reality. Secular writers who write about spiritual subjects, says the Bishop in one of his letters to Abbot Anthony (Bochkov), “constantly descend into their sensual and transform the holy spiritual into their sensual. The soul does not find satisfaction or food in them. How beautiful is the verse in Zhukovsky’s Abbadon! And how tense the feeling is! It is obvious: in the writer’s soul there was neither a correct understanding of the subject being described, nor true sympathy for it. Due to the lack of truth, he composed it for the mind and for the heart, he wrote a false dream that could not find sympathy in the soul of a pious reader” 8. And in another little-known letter to one monk we encounter even stronger lines: “I really don’t like the works: the ode to God, the adaptations of the Psalms, everything, starting with the adaptations of Simeon of Polotsk, the adaptations from Job Lomonosov, Athalie de Racine, everything, all poetic works borrowed from the Holy Scriptures and religion, written by secular writers. By the name secular I do not mean one who is dressed in a tailcoat, but who is guided by wisdom and the spirit of the world. All these works are written from “opinion”, animated by “blood movement”. And about spiritual things one must write from “knowledge” facilitated by “spiritual action,” that is, the action of the Spirit. <...> I heard one stalwart gentleman recite the ode “God” with delight after dinner, during which he ate well and got drunk. It happened that he would read and spit saliva abundantly on everyone and everything, like buckshot from a large-caliber unicorn... Decent reading after a full lunch! True, great is the delight produced by the abundance of roast beef and champagne placed in the belly! The ode was written from the movement of blood - and the dead are busy decorating their dead! My soul cannot tolerate the stench of these works! For me, it’s better to read, for literary purposes, “Vadim”, “Prisoner of the Caucasus”, “Crossing the Rhine”: there secular poets talk about their own things - and in their own way, beautifully...” It would seem that the last phrase gives hope for some acceptance of worldly culture by the Lord. But the next line destroys this hope: “Let these dead men forsake the good news of God!” In the hierarchy of Christian values, worldly writers and poets still remain “dead.” Following the Vladyka’s thoughts, we can conclude that Russian classical culture - Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Zhukovsky - is a culture that forms a false worldview in the reader. They, secular writers, do not know, continues Bishop Ignatius, “what a crime it is: to disguise the spiritual, to distort it, giving it a material meaning! They would have obeyed God’s command “not to sing the song of the Lord on the rivers of Babylon.” Whoever is on the rivers of Babylon and does not apostatize from the Living God will weep at them” 9 . Now it becomes quite clear why in the list of the main passions and sins the Lord included the item “Disposition towards the dying sciences and arts of this age” (meaning the vanity of the artist himself, the creator of these arts), and in the list of virtues he placed the following: “Rejection of earthly wisdom as indecent for heaven” 10 . Let us turn to another point concerning the ontology of artistic creativity itself. Here we also encounter rows of diametrically opposed worldly and spiritual values, with that truly deepest abyss that separates the path of the artist and the path of the Christian. In fact, in secular culture what is most valued is the writer’s imagination, the power of artistic expressiveness, vivid imagery, and the originality of the author’s ideas and the way they are expressed. The concepts are generally accepted: “creative individuality”, “the world of the artist”, etc. But let us listen again to Bishop Ignatius, who relies in his reasoning on centuries-old patristic experience: “All children of the Universal Church move toward holiness and purity by mortifying their feelings, blood, imagination, and even “their opinions.” Between the mind and purity - the land of the Spirit - there are first “images”, that is, impressions of the visible world, and then opinions, that is, abstract impressions. This is a double wall between the human mind and God. From the life of images in the mind the carnal mind is formed, and from opinions the spiritual mind is formed; unacceptable faiths, incapable of living faith. That is why it is necessary to kill both imagination and opinions. Do you understand that opinion is a charm? Scripture calls this delusion “false reason” (Tim. 6:20), that is, arbitrary false reasoning that has appropriated the name of reason. The exact and correct concept of Truth is “knowledge”, knowledge comes from vision, vision is the action of the Holy Spirit. When there is no true knowledge in the mind, it is replaced by invented knowledge.” Creativity in a secularized culture is always self-expression. First of all, what is important and interesting is what the artist has “his own” and how clearly it is expressed. But, from a Christian point of view, what does a person really have? Let us listen again to the stern words of the Saint: “We fell by rejecting God, by reviving our own; and ours is nothingness, non-existence. Having eliminated God from ourselves, having revived our own within ourselves, we gave birth to “death.” We are not able to lead ourselves into oblivion; but we could distort our existence, make it worse than non-existence, give birth to death (of course, spiritual death! Physical death is insignificant compared to mental death). In order to kill death, one must eliminate from oneself everything that has brought and preserved death: the spirit penetrates the self-mortified person, and, as the Creator, grants him “rebirth” 11. From here it is clear that the churching of culture is a return to the situation when the artist in word, paint, and sound expressed not his own, but God’s, as was the case in the medieval Orthodox culture of Holy Rus'. But what does this mean on a personal level for a creative person who has come to faith and joined the church? Vladyka Ignatius outlines certain paths on which only the combination of the concepts “Christian” and “artist” is possible, and in his work “The Christian Shepherd and the Christian Artist” he writes: “True talent, having learned that the Essentially Graceful is one God, must cast out all passions from the heart, eliminate all false teaching from the mind, acquire for the mind the evangelical way of thinking, and for the heart - evangelical feelings. The first is given by studying the Gospel commandments, and the second by actually fulfilling them <...>. When the talent has acquired the evangelical character - and this is at first associated with labor and internal struggle - then the artist is illuminated by inspiration from above, then only he can speak holy, sing holy, paint holy <...>. In order to think, feel and express spiritually, one must bring spirituality to the mind, the heart, and the body itself. It is not enough to imagine goodness or to have the correct concept of goodness: you must infuse it into yourself, be imbued with it” 12. The Vladyka advised one clergyman who wrote poetry: “Practice yourself constantly and humbly, eliminating all heat from yourself, and draw inspiration from it for your writings through the prayer of repentance. Then subject your writings to your own strict criticism and, in the light of your conscience, enlightened by the prayer of repentance, mercilessly cast out from your writings everything that belongs to the spirit of the world, that is alien to the spirit of Christ. Woe to those who laugh now! These are the words of Christ! This is a definition that came from God! Judging yourself and examining yourself, you will see that every word spoken and written in the spirit of this world puts its stamp on the soul, which seals the assimilation of the soul to the ruler of the world. Repentance is necessary in such words, torn out by passion and ignorance” 13. So, the main source of genuine Christian creativity is the deepest personal repentance, lamentation for one’s sins. And the basis of such creativity should not be self-expression, but self-sacrifice. But is this truly narrow path possible - the path of holiness, which the Lord offers to the culture and man of modern times? Let us only say that Saint Ignatius himself followed precisely this path, and today we can see the fruits of his efforts. His book, called with the strict and dry word “Ascetic Experiences,” is in fact filled with the most diverse works in genre and style, written in beautiful language. Many of them are original lyrical-theological essays, prose poems. Vladyka always attached great importance to literary form, style, and language. One syllable, he believed, should be for articles about monasticism, another for theological articles, a third - in works about Christian morality and philosophy, etc. Pushkin’s work attracted Vladyka with its aesthetic side: he appreciated the thoroughness of finishing, “purity of style,” “clarity of intent” of the poet’s poems, and admitted that he himself follows Pushkin’s method, subjecting his works to the most thorough revision, achieving clarity and ease of reading 14 . Speaking about the content, the essential side of his creations, Saint Ignatius repeatedly noted that he did not consider them in the full sense of the word “mine”: “I do not recognize these works as belonging to me. They flowed from the Fatherly Scriptures and from the mercy of God, and it was granted to me to write them for the benefit of many souls, therefore, for the benefit of my soul.” This consciousness allowed the Bishop to really look at “his” works from the outside and give them such high, but completely objective assessments, such as: “The book “Experiences” will bring significant benefits to those who want to be saved (in recent times)”, it “places the attentive reader in the category of true Orthodox Christians and gives him a decisive, one-sided, saving direction” 15. And it is not pride, but the greatest humility that the Lord showed in such a position, diametrically opposed to the variations on the theme “I erected a monument to myself” so beloved by poets... Precious evidence for us has been preserved - the Vladyka’s record of how one of his works was created. This entry reveals a picture of how truly holy inspiration visits a holy person: “Having received your letter, I talked with him for a long time: to this day it constantly lies on the table near my bed. I spend most of my time on it; I have one occupation - lying down: this is the lot of the sick. Often I re-read the deep letter. And then the other day, as usual, I was lying alone in my cell, as usual: I suddenly and vividly imagined that I was at the grave of Konstantin Fedorovich. A wonderful, unexpected inspiration took possession of my soul: I jumped out of bed, rushing to write down on paper the thoughts that presented themselves to me in a numerous host. When I translated them onto paper, my hand barely had time to depict, first in letters, then with some signs and hints, thoughts boiling in the spring, mixed with even more wonderful sensations. Then I re-read the scribbled piece of paper, and I see: this is not my property. A gratifying, comforting inspiration descended on me - not for me alone: ​​it belongs to you more than to me. I am sending it to you instead of a red egg. You will receive and read it on the days of Holy Easter. Let others celebrate the holiday with noisy entertainment: the “Word from Eternity” will serve as a delight for you. This is the conversation of a voice that I heard mysteriously” 16. Of course, for a modern intellectual who is little familiar with Orthodox dogma, everything that Bishop Ignatius said about artistic creativity may seem too strict, unacceptable and even shocking. But the word of God for this world has always been “foolishness” (1 Cor. 1.21). “What strange words! Who can listen to this? - they said to the Lord himself after His sermon, and, as the Evangelist John testifies, “from that time on, many of His disciples departed from Him and no longer walked with Him” (John 6:60). We have, however, convincing evidence that the thoughts of Bishop Ignatius were not in fact his personal views, but belonged to the Church. Soon after his death, the Lord appeared in a vision to his spiritual child and said: “Everything that I have written in my books is the truth” 17 . Letter from Archimandrite Ignatius to K.P. Bryullov dated April 27. 1847 // Collection of letters of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, Bishop of the Caucasus and Black Sea. M.; St. Petersburg, 1995. P. 473. (Hereinafter – Collection of letters...) Berdyaev N. A. Philosophy of freedom. The meaning of creativity. M., 1989. S. 386, 395, 447 John (Ekonomtsev), abbot. Orthodoxy. Byzantium. Russia. M., 1992. S. 180–182, 186, 192 Elder Silouan: Life and Teachings. M., 1991. S. 140, 141, 153 Letters from Ignatius Brianchaninov, Bishop of the Caucasus and Black Sea to Anthony Bochkov, Abbot of Cheremenetsky. M., 1875. P. 27; Wed With. 550–551 of this edition. (Hereinafter referred to as “Letters... to Antony Bochkov.”) Ignatius (Brianchaninov), St. Essays. T. 7. Letters. M., 1993. P. 321 Ignatius (Brianchaninov), set. Christian pastor and Christian artist. P. 505 of this edition Letters... to Antony Bochkov. P. 29; Wed With. 552 of this edition Collection of letters... P. 324–325 Ignatius (Bryannaninov), set. Complete collection of creations. T. 1. M., 2001. S. 156, 161 Collection of letters... P. 322–324 Ignatius (Brianchaninov), set. Christian pastor and Christian artist. P. 506 of this edition Letters... to Antony Bochkov. P. 28; Wed With. 551 of this edition Ignatius (Brianchaninov), St. Essays. M., 1993. T. 7. Letters. pp. 327, 413, 437; Letters... to Antony Bochkov. P. 29; Wed With. 552–553 of this edition Ignatius (Brianchaninov), St. Essays. M., 1993. T. 7. P. 426–427, 435, 436 Letter to F.P. Opochinin dated March 30, 1848 // Collection of letters.. pp. 615–616. “The Word from Eternity” was included in the first volume of “Ascetic Experiences” under the title “Voice from Eternity” Ignatius (Brianchaninov), set. Complete collection of creations. T. 1. P. 600