Counsels of St Ilia the Righteous (Chavchavadze)
Three divine treasures have come down to us from our fathers and grandfathers: our land, our language, our faith. If we do not care for them, what kind of people shall we be, and what answer shall we give to our posterity? We do not know about others, but we would not let even our own father level our native tongue with the ground. This is something sacred, it is common property, and no one should touch it with a sinful hand.
Christianity, besides the teaching of Christ, meant with us the whole land of Georgia; it meant Georgian-ness. Even today, throughout Transcaucasia, “Georgian” and “Christian” are words of one and the same meaning. Instead of saying that someone was made a Christian, they will tell you that he was made a Georgian. Our clergy knew well that land and nationhood, joined with the faith and grown together with the faith, are an unconquerable sword and an unbreakable shield against the enemy. The word of their preaching, their teaching, their instruction, they always turned to this: to ennoble land and nationhood up to the level of the faith, to raise them to the height of religion, and to make the people serve all these three holy and greatest things, joined into one, with self-denial and act for them with self-sacrifice.
See where and in what our clergy of old found their spiritual and bodily strength, their might, their honour! See how the clergy made firm the faith in Christ in this little country, which was ringed about by enemies like dragons who sought to tear Christianity up by the roots. See what enabled this little country to beat back countless enemies! The clergy brought land and nationhood to the aid of the faith, and the faith to the aid of land and nationhood; and a people so taught carried this trinity before them, passed through fifteen hundred years of war and bloodshed, and preserved for the Georgian both his home and his Georgian-ness.
The law of Christ was for Georgians not only a confession of faith; it was at the same time the political mortar for uniting and gathering the many parts of Georgia. Unity of faith foretold the unity of the nation. Such were the times, and no other element could then have established that unity which has been longed for since the beginning of our history. Among other reasons, this is why the Georgian guarded his faith, which, besides its own inward worth, served as mortar for unity. Those who shaped our destiny saw this good long ago, and there is not one renowned man or king among us who did not, among other things, look upon the faith of Christ with this eye. Therefore, as soon as the political turning of fortune gave them leisure, every one of them strove, sparing nothing, that the law of Christ, exalted and made attractive by its inward worth, should be exalted and adorned by outward worth as well, and that its monasteries and churches should be spread everywhere in memory and glory of the law of Christ.
The people of Georgia opened their heart, planted within it the precious Cross, and were themselves crucified; yet they let no one shake either their heart or the Cross planted deep and firm within it. Since then, for fifteen centuries, with the cross in his heart and the sword in his hand, the Georgian has fought, laboured and shed his blood, and no one has made him exchange light for darkness.
The fame and glory of our history, the miracle-working fortitude, self-denial, self-sacrifice and manliness of our glorious forebears — all this is lit by that light, clothed in that radiance, which the “Tree of Truth,” raised up by the grace and labour of St Nino, poured out over our whole country. On that tree, in letters of light, in the holy blood of Christ, was written and is written that commandment which is greater than all commandments: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Our country worshipped the Teacher of this commandment, confessed Him as God and lit its heart for Him as a pure candle, which to this day has not gone out and will not go out until the Georgian himself is no more. For this man-loving God our country believed; to Him it gave all in exchange, to Him it offered everything that has been granted to man for his happiness; it set a crown of thorns upon its head and for fifteen centuries carried it unbowed, its head and face bloodied, and brought it down to our own day undefiled.
Great martyrdom is a sign of a great nature, as is great victoriousness. Great martyrdom is the same as a great victory, which falls to the lot of a man of great nature; only the victor is happy because he himself delights in what victory brings, whereas the martyr burns away like a candle and only lights the way for others.
That is why the martyr’s crown of thorns is more disinterested, more compelling, dearer to the heart, and therefore more beautiful, more honourable and more worthy of glory. It is to these martyrs alone that mankind prays; these alone it confesses as saints and venerates with prayer and blessing.
The crown of thorns brought down to our own day by our forebears is beautiful with this beauty, renowned with this renown, glorious with this glory. If it can justly be said of anyone that they burned themselves away and lit the path for others, it is said of our fathers and grandfathers, and we, their grateful children, should fall down with tender hearts before their graves and sing glory to the glorious and praise to the praised.
St Nino came to us, made known and taught us the law of Christ, and a new and beautiful covenant renewed our country for a new life. To that new law, to this new covenant, the Georgian joined from the old everything that is precious to a man and that will never grow old so long as man exists: he joined to it his land and his nationhood. These three things, each worthy of the other, were so woven and interlaced with one another that the defence of the faith turned into the defence of the soil of Georgia, and the defence of the soil into the defence of the faith. The faith became the sword of our land, of our nationhood, for attack, and its shield against those who attacked.
The Christianity spread and established by the apostolate of St Nino saved us not only in soul but in body too. That greatest of teachings, which Christ God sent to the world for its rescue and salvation, spread its victorious mantle over our land, over our nationhood; it sheltered them like orphans, reared them by its divine strength, clothed them, put an iron heart in them and gave them the precious Cross and the Tree of Truth to lead them. And for fifteen hundred years now Christianity has preserved for us by this strength our land, our language, our identity, our nationhood.
The spreading and establishing of Christianity is, taken by itself alone, a great labour; and since Christianity bound and strengthened us like mortar in stone, since Christianity led us to the preserving and the saving of our land and our nationhood, that labour is doubled for us, made greater, made stronger. This doubled, this magnified labour our enlightener St Nino laid down for us. This is what truly makes glorious, truly makes a great feast, that day on which our Church glorifies the memory of this virgin equal to the apostles. This apostle, clothed in divine grace, made us drink from the unfailing spring of divine truth and sent us that teaching which adopted our land and our nationhood as its own children and has cared for both to this day.
Christ God was crucified for the world, and we were crucified for Christ. We laid open the breast of this little Georgia, and on that breast, as on a rock, we raised a temple for Christianity; for stones we used our bones and for mortar our blood, and the gates of hell did not prevail against it. We were cut down, we were slaughtered, we gave up our lives, we gave up our wives and children, we made even battles that were unequal, we gave the flesh for the spirit — and one handful of a nation preserved Christianity and did not let it die out in this little country, which we call, with just pride, our homeland, our fatherland.
Difference of religion does not frighten us. The Georgian, crucified for his own faith, knows how to honour the faith of others too. That is why there is no example in our history of a Georgian ever wishing to oppress or persecute another’s faith. Armenians, Jews, even Muslims living among us can reproach us with nothing in this. Those persecuted and oppressed for their faith in other lands found here among us a peaceful refuge and freedom of conscience.
Whenever Georgia had a respite from the onslaught of outward enemies and from beating them back, it set at once to the work of confirming and strengthening the confession of Christ. Whenever the state of the country allowed it, Georgians, known for their spiritual labours and fired with piety and the feeling of faith, came forward as spreaders and defenders of the Orthodox faith in the East: Asia Minor, Syria and the Balkan peninsula itself, with the islands round about it, bear witness even today to the labours of Georgians for the faith. Everywhere there are still many remains — mute but unlying witnesses that the zeal of the Georgians for the faith set its foot and stretched out its hand far afield. Monasteries built at the expense and with the money of Georgians — not one or two — proclaim even today on Mount Athos, in Sinai, in Syria and around Jerusalem that the Georgians laboured with self-denial and great fortitude outside their own country too, for the glory of their faith.
“Be thou also perfect, as the Father in heaven” — this is the beginning and the end of a human life. What distance anyone has travelled, whether a single person or a whole nation, how far forward anyone has gone on this road of perfection, how greatly anyone’s longing of soul is kindled to walk this road untiringly — that is the measure both of a single person’s worth and of a whole nation’s.
Man, and a nation still more, does not live “by bread alone.” It is true that a hungry man will not go far on this road of the struggle between grace and evil; but without grace too he is good for nothing, like flesh without a soul. Life is a single river with two great branches: one brings food for the flesh, the other for the soul. If either dries up, the body of the nation is dead, like flesh without a soul and a soul without flesh, at least as far as this world goes. Therefore whoever cries out and pleads for the bread of the body must labour just as much, if not more, for the bread of the soul. Man, like a whole nation, is not made in order to eat bread; he eats bread in order to live as a human being and to let his posterity live so.
God has given you a mind and a heart; exercise them while life is in you. The mind will light your way, the heart will warm it, God is strong… In everyone’s heart — be he lord or serf, be it I or you — a fire is burning that God has lit; we must not put out that fire if we wish to meet our Maker with an open face. That fire sometimes makes me, and you, and others too, do such a deed as astonishes the world… What of it, that you and I are small today? Who knows… if fortune turns tomorrow, who will be in front and who behind?.. Let us do what we can; that is what God asks of us, and what men ask too.
God has given us all a mind and a heart and the power to do good — to some, it is true, little, to some much; but from him who has much much will be required, and from him who has little, little. He did not give them so that we might hide them in a chest or in the ground, like that lazy servant, but so that — since there are many in need in this world — we might give them out and gain something; otherwise we shall be left empty-handed when God calls us to account. That is why these words are so true: “What thou givest away is thine; what thou keepest is lost.” That grace of God which was placed in every one of us from the very beginning is lost to us if we have not made it bear good.
Perhaps you think that whoever does a good deed does it for the sake of a name? No, the name comes of itself and attaches itself to the good deed. It is true that there are people who do good only so that their name may remain. Then they are selling that good deed for a name. That is a bad thing, but what dispute is it of yours and mine? Let them sell it, if they will, so long as the goods are good; let the deed be praiseworthy, and let us leave the sifting of the heart’s desires to the will of God.
When… you turn your face away from a man, it is as though you had turned your face from Christ God. Jesus said: on the day of judgement I shall say to you, I was thirsty and ye gave me no drink; I was hungry and ye gave me no meat; I was naked and ye clothed me not; I was sick and ye visited me not. And when they say to me, Lord, when did we see thee and not help thee? — I shall say to them: every needy person whom you did not visit was I… Another for you and you for another — this is the way of life, this is the bridge of salvation, this is the key of paradise!..
This fleeting world is the wrestling of sin and grace, and nothing else. One man takes sin upon his back and it is heavy as lead; another takes grace, and it is light as down.
Where there is a desire for enjoyment, there is no love; love is suffering. “Suffering is the debt and the measureless sacrifice of love,” says one of our Georgian poets. And it is true!.. In love a man must seek love itself; in love a man must love love itself for love’s sake, and not for the sake of any desire. Where a person’s “I” enters in, there will certainly, unwillingly, arise the servitude of one to the other. The weaker must yield to the stronger; there will be despotism and servitude, and not the full, single-voiced harmony of two equal souls, whose joining makes one lost, single being. You must forget your own “I” and be joined with his “I”; then the meaning of love will be fulfilled, then a whole sea of suffering will open out…
You are praiseworthy as a man only if you plant this rule as your rule: to ask yourself every day — well, whom did I do good to today, and how?
Overcome your enemy with goodness; keep from paying back in blood; to conquer by magnanimity is better than to conquer by valour.
Pity, and do not be angry at, the man who comes at you out of envy!.. Cover with good, as with a shield, the one who wishes you evil; give to drink from the spring of grace the one who stands in the pool of sin.
Nothing in the world is to be rejected because it is old, nor commended because it is new. This plain truth needs no great measuring line and plumb, nor any excessive opening of the mind, for a man not to prefer fresh mud to an old rose merely because the mud is fresh and the rose is old.
To judge the goodness or badness of a deed or a thought merely by its age or newness, to weigh worth merely by the fact that this is of yesterday and that of today, to reject a truth merely because it is old and to raise a lie into a truth merely because it is new, is — say what you will — more than laughable. Such a balance, such a choosing of good and bad, of true and false, shows only one thing: that the man understands neither good nor bad, has known neither truth nor falsehood, and is grinding away in vain like a mill left to the wind.
To receive another’s opinion does not mean, willy-nilly, to agree with it, but to treat it with the respect with which another’s opinion should be treated, even one that is unpleasant to you, even one against you. To treat it with respect means also to sift the grounds of the one who speaks or judges, to weigh those grounds on your own scales, to set your own price on them one way or another, and so to measure out the measure. The only fitting conduct of a person of open mind and true enlightenment is precisely this way and no other. Whoever does not do this lays claim to enlightenment in vain and in vain fools both himself and others that he is an enlightened man. He is worse than anyone whose mind is shut.
As a certain wise man said, there are things in this world that you will not believe unless you see them, and there are things that you will not see unless you believe them. Heaven, and what is beyond heaven, are just such places for a seeking mind: unless you believe, you will see nothing.
A man should have two names, our people say: one to leave here, the other to take with him. No one has fulfilled this testament of the Georgian as King David did. Here his name remained, as a king, the Builder; and there, as a man of great nature, he took with him the name of a saint, adorned with the crown of glory.
Take this as a testament from me: mix no dishonesty and no dishonour into any work. Remember always that in this world, besides paper, there is also conscience, on which an agreement is written so firmly and so fast that no power will erase or annul it. It is impossible to found the dealings of people upon the beginnings of dishonesty, and a work that proceeds from the breaking of moral principles will be of use to no one. Remember for ever that there is no right without duty, and that duty is to respect and even to defend the right of another, and not to violate it.
What is wealth? Wealth is a good thing… what can I say against it; but it is still not a necessary condition of happiness. Without it happiness feels itself well, and will feel itself well, if only we are the kind of people who strive first of all to satisfy the moral side.
If a man counts his own identity as nothing, then what is left of the human being in such a man? Times change; the time will come when a man who has stepped away from his own identity will be condemned by all as unworthy — even by those who now gladly shelter and pet such a man. The time will come when it will be clear to everyone, as clear as twice two, that if a man has been false to his own, he will not be faithful to another’s either. Few know this truth today, and many will know it tomorrow; and then woe to the man who has grown cold to his own identity, indifferent to it, and has given it up!
Whatever a man holds to be better, more beneficial, more just, that he must support with all his fortitude and strength, regardless of whether it will offend someone or not. What talk can there be of offence where my conviction and my humanity call me to act for the good of the country? There the duty of a son of the fatherland requires that I shrink from nothing and set my hand hotly to what my manhood, my conviction and my conscience have set before me as a sign. This is what civic courage, manliness and generosity require.
The fast of repentance has come, the day of judgement has arrived. Not that judgement which is called the dread judgement and which is followed by hell and “the gnashing of teeth”… This is the kind of judgement where the accused himself is his own examiner and judge. Therefore here there will be no place for the “gnashing of teeth” or for hell. Here only one thing is needed: that a man count up his sins and say: I repent. And since this is so, everyone must reflect on his past life in order to sift his sins and his good, if he wishes to fulfil the Christian rule and not to waste the time of repentance for nothing.
What is surprising in my loving my own more, rejoicing in my own more, in my own being dearer to me and my helping my own more? The heart of a man is not a board, that you may rub out one thing and write another in its place. The feeling of love for one’s own is as strong, as firmly rooted, as natural — and therefore as just and as worthy of respect — as the love of a father for his child and a mother for her child. No force will cut that love out of the human heart! Every weapon is idle before it!
Where on one side there is the homeland and on the other something else, that other should be given only out of the surplus. And we, to our misfortune, are still far from any surplus; and what is not enough for us and what we ourselves lack, that we must save up and offer to our homeland alone.
Faith is the truth of the heart, and it does not take root twofold in one and the same heart. As a twofold truth is impossible, so is a twofold faith. It is either the one and only faith in a heart, or it is not there at all. Faith, whose great knot is in the spiritual depths of a person, cannot be two-eyed and two-hearted, so as to be ours and yours at one and the same time. It is one-eyed and one-hearted — if it may be put so — it cannot split either eye or heart in two, so as to see this one as Orthodox and that one too, and to give the hope of the heart to this one and to that one. Therefore unshakeable loyalty to another’s faith is the shaking, is the denial, of one’s own faith. Those who have laid down their lives for one faith cannot lay down their lives for another, and still less be unshakeably loyal to it. A person holds unshakeably only to the faith which he confesses and carries in his heart. Without this, faith is not faith but a garment, which a man puts off when he likes and puts on when he likes.
Doubtless he acts very sensibly who reads Holy Scripture constantly. The reader of it gains in two ways: first, he learns to entreat God, and the more he reads the more firmly the faith of Christ is planted in his heart; and second, he will meet there many genuine Georgian words, many of which are no longer used in ordinary speech but were in use at the time when Holy Scripture was translated into Georgian from the Greek. Only, a word taken from there must be used in the way, in the idiom, in which the people speak today.
Song and chant are nothing else than poetry and music happily woven together. Here, in song and chant, ordered sound helps ordered words and ordered words help ordered sound, so that a person may utter fully and completely the movement of his soul and the beating of the vein of his heart. Sound and word, each on its own, are in many cases too weak to draw up from the depths of the human heart those pearls, great and small, of which the human heart is full and which rise up whenever either sorrow or joy stirs the divine strings of a person’s soul. Song in this respect is the same as a tear, which comes both when grief squeezes the heart and when great joy visits it.
And since in this world the human heart is stirred not only by joy and sorrow but by a thousand other causes as well, between the sorrowful and the joyful song there are many other songs and chants. In this respect the human heart is a sea that will never be emptied with a spoon. So long as the heart beats, the heart itself will make a thousand different strings sound for a thousand different causes; and since the causes of the heart’s feeling are inexhaustible and unending, song itself, which is only the heart’s feeling and nothing else, will never have an end or a conclusion so long as the back of this earth carries and nurtures a human being. Outside man, in the world, there is no song. It belongs to man alone, as to one who is of God’s own. Nature granted this divine gift to man alone, and mankind holds that gift so precious that there is no person, no nation under heaven that does not set this gift to work and does not tend this beautiful plant sown by nature in the human soul and make it put forth at least a few flowers.
As the heart of a single person, so the heart of a nation is in many things unlike the heart of another nation… Because of this, the heart’s feeling and the heart’s expression are quite different, and every nation has its own idiom, its own melody for this difference. It is a mute poetry… It is the same as a language, only unclothed in flesh, undefined by words, unexplained by words; it is only a voice, a groan, a glad tidings, it is the cry of an inspired soul. This groan, this cry, is quite one thing with the Georgian and quite another with another nation, just as their speech is different.
I know no other man — neither layman nor cleric — in whose heart knowledge and faith dwelt together for action with greater peace and greater brotherhood. The departed (St Gabriel the bishop, Kikodze) was a deeply learned man and just as deeply a believer. In this, to my mind, lies his eminence and his significance, not for us alone but for others too, since many think that knowledge and faith cannot be fitted or set together. He is the example of that reconciling and that setting together.
There is war today too, only not the shedding of blood but the shedding of sweat: a bloodless war, peaceful and quiet. This war knows neither trumpet nor kettledrum. Without trumpet and drum it sows, without trumpet and drum it reaps. It is not like a pouring, lashing torrent that carries off mountain and plain, breaks down, gouges out and sweeps all away; it is “fruitful like the silent rain.” It knows neither plunder nor robbery. That is not in its nature, unless man himself has dripped into it the poison of pitiless greed and poisoned and envenomed it. This war is the war of labour, and, being labour, it is honourable, it is conscientious, and just as worthy of pride and distinction as the war of gun and sword once was. Manliness in such a war is far above the manliness of a bloody war. “One worker is worth three brave fellows,” a peasant will say in his own pointed way, if you let him tell the truth. And not only the peasant! This present day itself says this to us, cries it out — but do we hear that cry?
We read something out of books and think that we have laid hold of the axis of the world. Many things in this world are learned without books too, and these things must be known as well. But we no longer look either this way or that. Once we have a book in our hands, it is as though there were no wisdom anywhere but in a book.
Neither to be without books is good, nor to look out on the world from books alone. Without a book the arrow of one’s sight is short, and with only a book it is not long enough either. We think it beneath us to suppose there is a mind under an unlettered sheepskin coat too. We disdain, and do not believe, that every sensible person, even one who cannot read, is sometimes a master even to the learned.
The nature of a child is the mystery of mysteries. A child is a human being too, and the harder to make out because he is written in a shorthand that is difficult to read, if one may put it so, and not in large and full letters like a finished man. We should not be surprised that what we find in the great river we see also in its source. The child is the source, the beginning, of the grown person.
“Raise up your child, give strength to his soul, and let the commandment of Christ be his food.”
Is not every object high in its own measure, does not every one utter a high, divine wisdom? The polyp, which barely shows that it is a living thing, tells us of God’s might as plainly as the sun, that luminary which gives life to the world. The infusoria, which are in their millions in a handful of water, are as wonderful as the movement of millions of planets in the majestic sky; the joining together of the particles of a handful of mud is as wonderful as the revealing of the beauty of a rose. No, God has not created high and low things in nature: every thing is high in its own measure and tells us alike of that great Spirit who gives life to the whole world.
It often happens that when the soul is wasting away, the flesh is keeping holiday; when the soul flourishes, the flesh melts away.
A people whose expression, by the circumstances of the times, has sunk from the highest things to nothing but eating and drinking, or which has not been able to lift its mind above small things — such a people is more worthy of pity than of reproach.
Good that is done with grumbling and reproach … is worse than evil and harder to bear.
That feeling is true which does not mew every day like a cat, but has settled in the heart like a fair princess.
