Pobedonostsev: The Church (Part IV)

IV

We are sometimes told that ritual is a trivial and secondary
consideration. But there are ceremonies and practices which to abandon
would be to deny oneself, for they reflect the spiritual life of man,
they express his spiritual nature. In differences of ceremony are most
clearly expressed the fundamental and deep diversities of spiritual
conceptions hidden
in the unrecognised domains of the soul. It is this diversity which
prevents the communion and assimilation of peoples of different race,
and forms the elemental cause of distinctions of churches and
religions. To deny, from the abstract, cosmopolitan point of view, the
action of these attractive and repulsive forces, attributing them to
prejudice, would be to deny the affinities (walverwandsdiaft) which
analogously interact in the relations of individual men.

How remarkable, for instance, are the diversities in the funeral
ceremonies of different peoples, and in their conduct towards the
bodies of their dead. The Southerner, the Italian, flies the presence
of a corpse, and hastens to rid his house of it, committing to
strangers the duty of its burial. In Russia, on the contrary, a
religious feeling towards the dead body, full of love and tenderness
and piety, is a feature of the national character. The immemorial
lament for the dead, accompanied by poetical ceremonies and exercises,
on our conversion to a new faith was transformed into the solemn
prayers of the Church.

Nowhere outside our own country are the burial rites and ceremonies so
elaborate ; and there can be no doubt that this is an outgrowth of our
national character, in special conformity with our nature and our
outlook upon life. The features of death are everywhere repulsive and
terrible, but we veil them in splendid veils, we surround them with
the solemn stillness of contemplative prayer ; we chant over them
songs in which the terror of stricken nature is relieved by love and
hope and pious faith. We do not flee from the presence of death ; we
adorn it in its coffin; we are drawn to bend our eyes to the abode of
the departed soul ; we reverence the body, we grant it the last kiss,
and watch over it three days and three
nights with reading and chanting and prayer. Our funeral prayers are
full of beauty and magnificence; they are prolonged by hesitation to
surrender to the earth the body tainted by corruption; around the
grave not only do we hear the last blessing, but witness a great
religious solemnity enacted in the supreme moment of human existence.
How dear is this solemnity to the Russian, how well he understands it
! The stranger seldom understands it, because - because it is
strange. Among us the sentiment of love, defeated by death, expands in
the funeral ceremony ; the stranger is repelled by the ceremony, and
stricken by terror alone.

A German Lutheran resident of Berlin lost in Russia a dearly-loved
sister who belonged to the Orthodox Church. When, on the morning of
the burial, he arrived and saw his sister lying in the coffin he was
stricken by terror, his heart ceased to beat, the feeling of love and
piety which he felt in parting with the dead gave place to repulsion.
In this, as in many other things, the German who does not live among
us and enter into the depths of our spiritual life, cannot understand
us. Nothing repels the Lutheran so much as the adoration of the
sacred relics - a practice which to us, who venerate our dead, embrace
them, and honour them in burial, seems simple and natural. Not living
our life, he sees in this veneration but a barbarous superstition, for
us an act of love, the most simple and natural.

Even as he cannot understand our ritual, so we find coarse and
repugnant the agitation carried on in Germany and in England for the
practice of a new mode of disposing of the dead. It is demanded that
corpses shall be buried no more, but burnt in furnaces, specially
constructed ; and this is required for utilitarian and hygienic
reasons. This propaganda is gaining strength, its adherents hold
meetings, societies are formed, perfected furnaces constructed at the
expense of individuals, chemical experiments made, and funeral marches
composed to solemnise the incineration. . The demand for cremation is
made in the name of science, in the name of civilisation, in the name
of social well-being. To us these voices seem to come from a distant
world, a world so strange to us, so inhospitable and cold. May God
deliver us from dying in the land of strangers, far away from our
native Russian soil !