NOT OF THIS
WORLD
In a basement
apartment near downtown San Francisco
in the early 1960s, Eugene Rose, the
future Fr. Seraphim, sat at his desk covered with stacks of books and
piles of
paper folders. The room was perpetually dark, for little light could
come in
from the window. Some years before Eugene
had moved there, a murder had occurred in that room, and some said that
an
ominous spirit still lingered there. But Eugene,
as if in defiance of this spirit and the ever-darkening spirit of the
city
around him, had one wall covered with icons, before which a red
icon-lamp
always flickered.
In this room Eugene
undertook to write a monumental chronicle of modern man's war against
God, his
attempt to destroy the Old Order and raise up a new one without Christ,
to deny
the existence of the Kingdom
of God
and raise up his own earthly Utopia in its stead. This projected work
was
entitled The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God.
Only a few
years before this, Eugene
himself had been ensnared in the Kingdom
of Man
and had suffered in it; he too had been at war against God. Having
rejected the
Protestant Christianity of his formative years as being weak and
ineffectual,
he had taken part in the Bohemian counterculture of the 1950s, and had
delved
into Eastern religions and philosophies which taught that God is
ultimately
impersonal. Like the absurdist artists and writers of his day, he had
experimented with insanity, breaking down logical thought processes as
a way of
"breaking on over to the other side." He read the words of the mad
"prophet" of Nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche, until those words
resonated in his soul th an electric, infernal power. Through all these
means,
he was seeking to attain to Truth or Reality with his mind; but they
all
resulted in failure. He was reduced to such a state of despair that,
when later
asked to describe it, he could only say, "I was in Hell." He would
get drunk, and would grapple with the God Whom he had claimed was dead,
pounding on the floor and screaming at Him to leave him alone. Once
while
intoxicated, he wrote, "I am sick, as all men are sick who are absent
from
the love of God."
"Atheism," Eugene wrote in later years, "true
'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or
unmerciful
God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the
true God
Whose ways are so inexplicable even to the most believing of men, and
it has
more than once been known to end in a blinding vision of Him Whom the
real
atheist truly seeks. It is Christ Who works in these souls. The
Antichrist is
not to be found primarily in the great deniers, but in the small
affirmers,
whose Christ is only on the lips. Nietzsche, in calling himself
Antichrist,
proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ...."
It was in such a condition of intense hunger that Eugene
found himself in the late 1950s. And then, like a sudden gust of wind,
there
entered into his life a reality that he never could have foreseen.
Towards the
end of his life he recalled this moment:
"For years in my studies I was satisfied with being 'above all
traditions' but somehow faithful to them.... When I visited an Orthodox
church,
it was only in order to view another 'tradition.' However, when I
entered an
Orthodox church for the first time (a Russian church in San Francisco)
something happened to me that I had not experienced in any Buddhist or
other
Eastern temple; something in my heart said that this was 'home,' that
all my
search was over. I didn't really know what this meant, because the
service was
quite strange to me, and in a foreign language. I began to attend
Orthodox
services more frequently, gradually learning its language and
customs.... With
my exposure to Orthodoxy and to Orthodox people, a new idea began to
enter my
awareness: that Truth was not just an abstract idea, sought and known
by the
mind, but was something personal--even a Person--sought and loved by
the heart.
And that is how I met Christ."
While working on The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom
of God
in his basement apartment, Eugene
was still coming to grips with what he had found. He had come upon the
Truth in
the Undistorted Image of Christ, as preserved in the Eastern Orthodox
Church,
but he yearned to enter into what he called the "heart of hearts" of
that Church, its mystical dimension. He wanted God, and wanted Him
desperately.
His writings from this time were a kind of catharsis for him:, a means
of
emerging out of untruth, out of the underground darkness and into the
light.
Although they are philosophical in tone, much more so than his later
works,
these early writings were born of an intense suffering that was still
very
fresh in his soul. It was only natural that he would write much more
about the Kingdom of Man,
in which he had suffered all his life, than about the Kingdom
of God,
of which he had as yet only caught a glimpse. It was still through the
prism of
the Kingdom of Man
that he viewed the Kingdom
of God.
Of all the fourteen chapters Eugene
planned to write for his magnum opus, only the seventh was typed in
completed
form; the rest remain in handwritten notes. This seventh chapter, which
we
present below, was on the philosophy of Nihilism.
Nihilism--the belief that there is no Absolute Truth, that all
truth is
relative--is, Eugene affirmed, the basic philosophy of the 20th
century:
"It has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered
so
thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living
today,
that there is no longer any 'front' on which it may be (ought." The
heart
of this philosophy, he said, was "expressed most clearly by Nietzsche
and
by a character of Dostoyevsky in the phrase: 'God is dead, therefore
man
becomes God and everything is possible.'"
From his own experience, Eugene
believed that modern man cannot come to Christ fully until he is first
aware of
how far he and his society have fallen away from Him, that is, until he
has
first faced the Nihilism in himself. "The Nihilism of our age exists in
all," he wrote, "and those who do not, with the aid of God, choose to
combat it in the name of the fullness of Being of the living God, are
swallowed
up in it already. We have been brought to the edge of the abyss of
nothingness
and, whether we recognize its nature or not, we will, through affinity
for the
ever-present nothingness within us, be engulfed in it beyond all hope
of
redemption--unless we cling in full and certain faith (which, doubting,
does
not doubt) to Christ, without Whom we are truly nothing."
As a writer, Eugene
felt he must call his contemporaries back from the abyss. He wrote not
only out
of his own desire for God, but out of his concern for others who
desired Him
also--even those who, as he himself had once done, rejected God or
warred
against Him out of their very desire for Him.
Out of his pain of heart, out of the darkness of his former
life, Eugene
speaks to contemporary humanity which finds itself in the same pain and
darkness. Now, four decades since he wrote this work, as the powers of
Nihilism
and anti-Christianity enter more deeply into the fiber of our society,
his
words are more needed than ever. Having faced and fought against the
Nihilism
in himself, he is able to help prevent us from being captured by its
soul-destroying spirit, and to help us cling to Christ, the Eternal
Truth
become flesh.
