Repentance
Pokayanie
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I. Repentance
Not to resist evil does not mean not to struggle against evil: on the contrary, it means to struggle with evil, but not to struggle with the person—to struggle only against what is evil, what is mistaken in the person, to struggle with evil while feeling compassion and love for the person possessed by evil.
The words and actions of a person depend on the direction he gives to his thoughts. Therefore the struggle with evil consists in trying to change the thoughts or to be able to bring about a change in the thoughts of the person doing evil. In this sense the possibility of an apostolic struggle with evil is revealed. People who feel in their souls the need for heroic deeds and self-denial can go as individuals to meet evildoers in their camp, as close brothers, as cohabitants with them, and at the cost of personal suffering and humiliation, by the effort of their whole life, awaken the son of God in their fallen brothers. The method consists in this: having dedicated oneself to God, to bind one’s life with the life of the evildoer and in all the good deeds of everyday life to share fraternally with him the good of life, while hindering his evildoing by one’s presence and one’s conviction, risking one’s own bodily life and thus dedicating it to God. This is a beautiful outlet for a great soul in our time, when there are so many easy ways to communicate the truth to the vast majority of people who thirst for it, when the special calling of apostleship among peaceful brothers no longer has a place, when if the brotherhood of people and nations is not yet exalted, it is already acknowledged by people; and the time is not far when all people will be taught by God and when, one may hope, in place of evildoers there will be found sick, unhappy people who committed evil only because they were abandoned. In any case, the enemy can be conquered only when the best forces come out to fight against him. The struggle with evil must always be the lot of the best representatives of humanity, and not as it is now in the existing order: of policemen, jailers, officials—people of greed, vanity, pride, hypocrisy, and favoritism—so that if you exclude these vices from the privileges of the present fighters against evil, these large salaries, reprehensible incomes, ranks, medals, subordination and sycophancy, then all these now so zealous fighters and orators—all of them will scatter.
To bind evil in a person, one must bring about a change of thoughts in him. By deception, though unreliably, one can still bring about a change of thoughts; but by violence never and under no circumstances.
There is an undeniable calculation for people in not resisting the evildoer—a calculation in this: by non-resistance and good to gain a repentant person. And we cannot even approximately imagine how a soul cleansed by repentance can reward us. In every evildoer whom we coerce and punish, we may be losing a saint. The Gospel says that “there is more joy in heaven among the angels of God over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” If only not all, if only a hundredth part of all the so-called criminals who have been senselessly killed and are being killed, who have suffered and are suffering while serving their punishments, finding in punishment their redemption; if only a thousandth part of them, under the influence of non-resistance and good, repented to the end and themselves sought the means of their redemption—how can we know what these repentant souls could give us? Perhaps the Kingdom of God would long ago have been among us in glory and in power, and we would long ago have ceased to see all those calamities amidst which we now see no way out. So that, in resisting the evildoer, we not only disturb the proportion and correctness of our life and harm our spiritual health, but we also lose extraordinarily, immeasurably much: we lose what, had we wished, we could have gained.
—Buka
II. Stones
Two women came to an elder for instruction. One considered herself a great sinner. In her youth she had been unfaithful to her husband and never ceased tormenting herself. The other, having lived her whole life according to the law, reproached herself with no particular sin and was satisfied with herself.
The elder questioned both women about their lives. One admitted to him with tears her great sin. She considered her sin so great that she expected no forgiveness for it; the other said that she knew of no particular sins in herself. The elder said to the first:
“Go, servant of God, beyond the fence and find me a large stone—as large as you can lift—and bring it. And you,” he said to the one who knew of no great sins in herself, “bring me stones too, as many as you can carry, only all of them small.”
The women went and fulfilled the elder’s command. One brought a large stone; the other, a full sack of small stones.
The elder examined the stones and said:
“Now do this: take the stones back and put them in the very same places where you took them, and when you have put them back, come to me.”
And the women went to fulfill the elder’s command. The first easily found the place from which she had taken the stone and laid it down as it had been; but the other could not remember from which place she had taken which stone, and so, without fulfilling the command, she returned to the elder with the same sack of stones.
“So it is,” said the elder, “the same happens with sins. You easily put the large and heavy stone back in its former place because you remembered where you took it.
“But you could not, because you did not remember where you took the small stones.
“The same is true of sins.
“You remembered your sin, bore for it the reproaches of people and of your conscience, were humbled, and thereby were freed from the consequences of sin.
“But you,” the elder turned to the woman who had brought back the small stones, “sinning with small sins, did not remember them, did not repent of them, grew accustomed to living in sins, and, judging the sins of others, sank ever deeper and deeper into your own.”
We are all sinners, and we will all perish if we do not repent.
Translator’s Notes:
- “Buka” was a pseudonym used by several writers; the author of Part I has not been definitively identified. The name means “boogeyman” in Russian colloquial usage.
- The quotation about joy in heaven over one repentant sinner is from Luke 15:7, though the Jubilee Edition version slightly modifies the Gospel phrasing.
- Part I presents a remarkably radical vision of Christian response to crime: instead of policemen and judges (whom the author characterizes as corrupt and self-serving), the best people should go live among criminals as brothers, sharing their lives and through patient love leading them to repentance.
- The parable in Part II is a version of a traditional story found in various forms in Christian teaching. The point is that conscious awareness of sin, painful though it is, leads to humility and redemption—while unconscious accumulation of “small” sins, unrecognized and unrepented, leads to spiritual death.
- The theme of preferring one great, remembered sin to many small, forgotten ones appears in other religious literature, including the stories of the Desert Fathers.
- Both parts emphasize Tolstoy’s conviction that repentance—metanoia, a genuine change of heart and mind—is more valuable than any external punishment and that a repentant sinner is of more worth than a self-satisfied “righteous” person.