The Spiritual Basis for the Struggle Against Bolshevism

Marian Zdziechowski

 The Spiritual Basis for the Struggle Against Bolshevism

Lecture given in May 1931 at the Eucharistic Congress in Vilna

The specter of the near and dangerous future haunts and torments me day and night. And it is not something that fear has led me to envision, as some of my friends think, nor is it a product of a feverish, sick imagination. No, the specter I am talking about stems from reality, from what we are seeing with our own eyes or hearing from eye witnesses — it is like a dark cloud, laden with thunderbolts, driven from the nearest east, from Minsk and Kiev, from Smolensk and Moscow. What is going to happen, I ask, when one day all of us suddenly find ourselves in the clutches of the Red terror?

In his open letter to [his?] French friends, Friedrich Muckermann,1 one of the most eminent, noble, and talented German priests, asks the same question almost word for word. “I inquire about this,” he writes, “because this thought is plaguing me day and night. I ask because I know Russia, because I spent an entire year in the Cherezvychaika prisons. Today it is not about Liege or Verdun or about Warsaw or Belgrade. It is about Europe and Asia. Especially for us, Catholics, it is about whether Soviet Moscow shall rule Rome. Yes, this is what this is about!”1

And one must not avoid thinking about this. One must not delude oneself that Russia, exhausted by hunger and poverty, is incapable of a military effort. Her citizens are dying of hunger, but the Red Army wants for nothing. The war budget is one billion rubles in gold. One after another, trains from Germany are passing through the First Republic of Lithuania, filled with instruments of destruction. Working under the guidance of German engineers and technicians, nearly 300 Soviet factories produce 37,000,000 kilograms of explosives annually for themselves and Germany. And if necessary, the Soviets can send 15,000,000 soldiers to the battlefields.

Hence, we must not ignore the thought that we are facing the possibility of a very near catastrophe that the world has never seen. And this is bound to lead to the establishment of universal communism, namely the transformation of the world into one great workshop where the human being, created in God’s image and likeness, would be reduced to a thoughtless and listless automaton carrying out its due work under coercion, in return for which it would be guaranteed minimum subsistence and nothing more, for the automaton-man has no right to need anything else. And then, according to the Soviets, the dangerous thought of God, which transports man from the hell of slavery worse than serfdom to the land of freedom and happiness, will have been completely eradicated from the human soul and there will be no one to instill it back. For it has been decided that in three or four years there will not be a single temple or priest in Russia.

There have been terrible epochs in history. I dare say that there has not been a single moment in history that would not horrify one with the injustices committed, and yet Fr. W. Förster rightly observed that never before has the human soul been so hopelessly lost in its earthly purposes. We take pride in how the genius of knowledge and technology triumphs over the external world, while in fact the outside world has never had as much power over the soul of man as it does today. So much is said about the modern spiritual culture, but we identify this culture with scientific knowledge, but one is so far from the other! For example, the science of pathology is developing increasingly quickly, but the will so shamefully surrenders to all that is pathological in man, to most abominable instincts and deviations. And today what we call reason is used primarily for unleashing and justifying the beast in man. If only our corruption did not go further than bestiality! But man has two options: to rise above the beast or fall even lower.2

Unfortunately, we are falling. Nevertheless, each of us harbors a need for infinity. In everything we desire, the will reaches farther than it is able to: rrequietum cor [restless heart]. This is the thirst for God. “Ye shall be as gods” (eritis sicut dii) — these words were written on the first page of history. They hover over the entire history of mankind. And would they constitute an irresistible temptation, “if they were not a falsification of God’s call, a false promise, fulfilling an inner and real need?”3 We can satisfy it with God or against God. There are only two options: “Will I want to live for God,” asks M. Blondel,2 “and die for the world and for myself, so that God becomes my self, or, wanting to be self-sufficient, will I reject God and, desiring infinitely, will I not desire infinity (vouloir infiniment sans vouloir l’infini)?”4

Neither our nature nor reason gives us goodness, yet Goodness exists and it exists all by itself; it is God. Many do not see or feel God’s presence, either in private or public life, or in history, and when they reflect on this, they could doubt God but God’s voice sounds loud enough in our conscience for us to hear it: “I wandered, like a lost sheep, seeking You without me, while You were within me” (ego erravi sicut ovis, quae perierat, quaerenste exterius, qui es interius).

But we want to know this God more closely, know him concretely. We want him to descend into the tragic depths of our life, to console, comfort, and help us. “Oh, if God lived here on earth among us,” says an old Jewish proverb, “all doors and windows would be open to Him.” And here Christianity comes to our aid. While the Greek sages arrived at the idea of Logos (Word) by meditating on God’s existence, in Christianity Logos emerged as a fact, as historical reality, as a living person. Christians have come to know Logos not like the ancient sages did, not in metaphysical or logical categories. Instead, they saw and venerated the Word, incarnated in the Crucified and Resurrected Savior of the world. All of this — the Incarnation, the Redemption, and the Resurrection — is a mystery of Faith, inaccessible to reason. From whatever side we approach it, we see darkness everywhere. It cannot be explained, much less proven. We cast off evidence and move on to facts. And here is the historical fact unprecedented in history in terms of its significance: Paul the Apostle’s3 vision at Damascus. And this vision not only brought about the conversion of the enemy and persecutor of Christians; it not only inspired and motivated the apostle of the nations to heroism of the apostolate, but it was also a turning point in the history of human thought, a starting point for this conception of the destiny of world and man, which the apostle beautifully outlined and on which rests Christian theology, philosophy, and world view.

There, near Damascus, Paul had direct contact with the Savior — he heard his voice and saw him “in a brilliance brighter than the sun.” Hence, Christ is alive. He did what no mortal has ever done: he defeated the greatest enemy known to man — death! Our nature protests against death with all its might, while each step brings us closer to death. So what is death? Obviously, a punishment, the Apostle replies, a punishment for crime, for sin. We shall all die. Therefore, we are all sinful and born in sin. The only one who freed himself from the law of death was Jesus Christ. He was indeed who he said he was — the Messiah, the Son of Living God. As he was without sin, he did not die for himself but for us. And he shall open the door of eternal life wide for those who believe in Him. The redemption epitomizes the gospel which He brought us, and the fact of the resurrection, namely the victory over death, is the fact central to history. Everything that came before was leading to it and everything that came afterwards is its consequence: “If Christ had not risen from the dead,” cries the eminent thinker and prophet Vladimir Solovyov, “the world would turn out an absurdity, a kingdom of evil, falsehood, and death. If Christ had not risen from the dead, then who would be able to do it?”5 In awe at the triumph of life, the Apostle cries out, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” And in anticipation of the epoch toward which the redeemed humanity was heading, the Apostle encompassed the spheres of life which no one at that time had thought of and which few are thinking of today. He reflected on the deprived condition of the animal which “groans and, like a woman giving birth, has been suffering ever since,” and he mystically linked that deprivation and slavery to the fall of man: the creation is anxiously waiting for the son of God to again shine in it, in man, for then “man shall be freed from the bondage of corruption onto the glorious liberty of God’s children.”

The triumph of life over death revealed in the Resurrection settled all doubts for both Paul the Apostle and, in our times, for the great Russian philosopher and visionary.6

“It is no longer me who is alive,” says Paul the Apostle in his letter to the Galatians, “but it is Christ who lives in me.” His words should not be understood in a rationalistic or metaphorical way — in the sense that the Apostle was impressed by Jesus as a person and his teaching same as, for example, Socrates’ disciples were impressed by his teachings. It must be taken literally, realistically. Each of us has a right to apply these words to themselves in a mystical sense, for through the Sacrament of the Eucharist, instituted at the Last Supper, the Savior “grafts himself into our soul, our blood, and our being.” This sacrament occasions, as beautifully put by a contemporary theologian, an organic crisis in human nature; it transforms its substance and through this internal transubstantiation it reassures he in whom faith is alive in his uplifted life, lifted above all smallness and changeability. “God became man,” said Saint Clement of Alexandria 4 “so that you, man, may learn from man how man becomes God...” “[T]hou shalt feed upon Me; nor shalt thou convert Me, like the food of thy flesh into thee, but thou shalt be converted into Me,” heard Saint Augustin God’s voice from above.7

If each of us could repeat these words of the great Saint Augustine with a clear conscience, it is would be the end of history, a realization of the Kingdom of God, where “God will be all in all men.” But we have still such a long way to go! The way to this far-off realization is the Church, the church community, which the Apostle calls the Body of Christ (Ephesians 1:23) or a process of building, where “you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22). Hence, the Church begins there — as beautifully interpreted by L. Laberthonnière5 — so as to conclude elsewhere.8 It develops and grows in time to flourish in eternity. In this earthly world, He is the beginning of the communion of souls in the Love and Truth of Christ, a means for its realization, and a symbol of that aeterna in caelis habitatio [eternal rest in heaven] which He shall be. What does the church community rest on? On the sacrament of the Eucharist, for Christ must dwell in every soul for the Church to become his actual mystical body.

The feeling of oppressive humiliation overtakes me, a man of this world, as I speak of these great things, knowing that I do not feel them the way I should, that they do not constitute the innermost contents of my soul, which is firmly and completely rooted in the earthly life. Hence, whenever possible, I prefer to speak with the words of others who are incomparably more worthy than I am. And here I take Meditations on the Gospels by the great Hungarian Bishop late Father Ottokar Prohászka,6 whom his compatriots — not only the Catholic ones — cherish as the noblest personification of the genius of Hungary, “the most precious pearl in the spiritual treasury of the nation.”

He was a poet in theology. People say that on every holiday he would walk out of town and wander in the mountains, forests, and meadows. Every flower, the buzzing of the bee, the murmur of a stream, the twitter of a lark flying into the sunny sky filled him with joy similar to that of Saint Francis of Assisi. “My inner world is modeled on the graceful shapes of the outside world. My soul learns how to sing from their silent music.” And when in the evening he returned from his trips with an uplifted and joyous soul, he would wait for the moment when the world around him was asleep and then he would go to the chapel in his home, where he often spent long nighttime hours praying before the sanctissimum. And the next morning, immediately after Mass, he would write down his thoughts, the fruit of his night-time communion with God.

His meditations on the feast of Corpus Christi read:9

The Blessed Sacrament is a cedar pith meant to be eaten by eagles. Ezekiel saw eagles eating the pith of the Lebanese cedars… The peaks of Lebanon, the pith of the cedars, and the eagles correspond to each other. Let our feelings and thoughts rise to these peaks [...]. Let our weak, our vague thoughts, our infirmae providentiae [uncertain forethought] give way to the thoughts of the Lord and our God, which in this sacrament become imprinted on our souls like a burning seal [...]. Through the Holy Communion, the Savior’s manner of thinking takes our mind over. Through the Communion, the likeness of Christ emanates from the eyes, the forehead, the lips of man, from his speech, his whole being, and his whole life [...]. Hence, I shall not look into the darkness of the world. Instead, I shall look into the eyes of Jesus, immersing myself in the Holy Sacrament. [This shall be the source of] the fervor, the fortitude, the will to fight against the spiritual and moral quagmire that has assumed such a formidable scale on earth.

Only holiness is capable of winning this battle. Holiness is the spirit of the Church and the Church generates it. The saints, says the bishop, are “the living ‘Te Deum,’” They are “God’s mountains, shooting out into the sky, into eternity [...] When I think of them, I feel as if on a high, quiet Tatra mountain peak.”10 Let us climb it and look at the giants of spirit. They are an expression of the highest creative forces of history. “They are the warmest, most powerful current passing through history…” This is the current of the apostolate, which draws its strength from the Eucharistic union with the Savior. This current shall sweep away Hell’s efforts...

Let me return to where I started. The Soviet East is mobilizing all elements and destructive forces against us, against the West, while we are watching this passively, with our governments paving the way for an invasion, as if deliberately preparing their own destruction, their end.

What does this mean? What is the source of this madness? If the imminent invasion were driven by purely human passions, such as lust for war and booty or the delight of power and pleasure, I suppose that Europe would be able to resist this enemy. But the driving force which brings these elements of destruction into Europe is a power not from this world. It is evil as a negation of everything that lifts us above the gray of the everyday life, above the changeability and nothingness — above all that we call God, divinity, spirit, soul, goodness, beauty, love, mercy, immortality, etc. And the emanation of this power, which is not from this world, curdles our blood as if we touched something alien, disgusting, and freezing. Some have bowed before this dark power and that brought them into a frenzy of possession, while others stand immobilized, in hypnotic inertia, waiting to find themselves in the mouth of the monster. Many might find ridiculous what I am saying here, but what can I do since the only explanation of the present state of affairs I can find is an active, direct interference of dark powers from the realm of darkness.

I am not the only one who thinks so. For on the occasion of German industrialists’ trip to Moscow (who were followed by Polish ones), Father Muckermann published a shocking article about the devil in politics and life. He cried:

Ally with just anybody except for the devil! You think that you are dealing with people and that together you shall make good profit.11 Greed has obscured the world of ideas to you. You are incapable of ideas, while they do have an idea — a satanic idea, an idea of hatred, an idea of fighting God, an idea of hell. And these ideas serve hell, as can be seen in their souls and on their faces, and as I write this, you sit down at the table with them — that is with the devil — and, drinking Kakheti wine and eating Astrakhan caviar, you are making a covenant with him! Oh, how I would like for my words to reach you, so that you would understand that something is coming, rushing, and nearing — something that humanity has not yet experienced — and that hell and devil are not an invention or a nightmare, but a reality! I have recently met an elderly Russian woman. She had been sentenced to death thrice. The horror of the things she had seen, the tragic misfortunes that had befallen her had spiritualized her face with the grace of immense goodness; I had never seen anything so beautiful. “Tell the world,” she said, “that the devil exists...”11

And what is the source of our weakness? The closer the 19th century was to its end, the more it succumbed to the intoxication with progress in science and in the discoveries and inventions that were subjugating nature. Based on this, the idea of all the technical, economic, and political opportunities was gaining demonic power over man. Progress was more than a slogan. It was the true God, whose symbol was the machine, and the gospel — the newspapers. That reflected on religion as well. Catholicism became somewhat timid. “How pale, how dull was our prayer! How distracted was our attention by the uninvited guests from the brilliant and enticing world, where the idol of progress was worshiped!” On the other hand, so much suspicion, such a lack of generosity, such parochialism of the thought and spirit were sometimes manifested toward those who dreamt of reconciling culture with religion and were looking for new ways and positions! How many workers of good will and fervent faith have been pushed away and have had their lives broken!”

I took the above quotation from the writings of one of the most eminent German Catholics, Professor Hermann Platz.127 I met him two years ago at a Polish-German Catholic pacifist congress in Berlin. I shall never forget how the sight of praying Germans struck me. At that moment their souls were far, far removed from worldly matters. And most of them were scholars, writers, or politicians. After the service or in the evenings, after the meetings, we — Professor Platz and I — went on walks together and became close to each other. What brought us closer? “Many times when I happened to be among strangers,” he said, “I concluded that those who carry the liturgical ideal in their hearts can quickly and easily communicate with one another.”

In our generally religiously shallow society, people have heard something about the liturgical movement. But even among those who have heard about it some do not suspect how deep its roots are. This movement is a reaction against this decrepitude of religious sentiment, against the intimidation and decline of religious thought which were a reflection of the noisy religion of progress concentrated on the potency of man and the consequent purely materialistic and at the same time demagogic culture boasting about technological advances, the culture which attracted and corrupted individuals with a desire for pleasure and also obliterated the awareness of sin and the necessity to purify oneself from it, and thus destroyed the divine element in man and turned the soul into a heap of debris.

“The soul! How strangely that word sounded to the ears of man in the urban culture!” says Hermann Bahr.8 “What is a soul? Who has a soul? Who has the time to have a soul?”13 But then came the terrible experiences of war and revolution. We watched the world come apart in the hands of the troubled souls which were crumbling away. We remembered that all historical progress has followed the path paved with periodic upheavals, during which man thoughtlessly destroys what he himself has laboriously built.

Both in every individual soul and in the social life awakened a longing for the organic, for the organic order; a longing for, to quote H. Platz, stepping out of the anthropocentric chaos and entering the theocentric Cosmos. It was understood that common prayer in communion with the Saints is a formative power, which brings this order into the soul and gives it peace. It is expressed in the liturgy. “The liturgy,” to quote H. Platz’s14 deep and beautiful words, “introduces us into the very essence of being, for the essence of being is epitomized by the sacrifice made on Golgotha; the liturgical ceremonies are the glorification of the Divine Sacrament, which perpetuates this sacrifice.” The Eucharist unites us with Christ and unites all of us, one with the other, in Christ (noque inter nos in eodem Christo conciliat et conjungit), turning us into one body (veluti unum corpus coagmentat).

They say that the liturgical movement is not a solution to the pressing matters of today because it is an escape from reality: laetatus sum in his quae dicta sunt mihi: in domum Domini ibimus [I am happy to hear that we are to visit the house of the Lord]; and there, in that house of God, in a state of concentration, into which brings us a serious and solemn Gregorian chant, and in the amazement generated in us by the vespers psalms, we feel not on earth, but above it. But this escape is necessary. In monte sancto, on the holy mountain, above the noise of the world and the fumes of the lowlands, the fresh breath of the mountains sobers [us] up and strengthens [us]. The soul, stunned by the noise of the passions clashing in the fight between nations, classes, and interests, by the slogans from turbulent party rallies, recovers its peace, its potency and its awareness of its potency. There it learns to see the world and life through the eyes of God,”15 and there it frees itself from indecision, from the irresoluteness that characterizes us, the people of this world, the modern people, rocked like ships on the sea by a gale of contradictory currents. There, we are reassured in our Catholic view of the world and life, in that the meaning and sense of life lies in the apostolate and in our obligation to go into the world, conquer it, transform it, and sanctify it.16 The more deeply we understand that the liturgy, said Abbot Herwegen,9 is the foundation of the Christian art of living, the more effective our work to heal modern culture shall be.

Will we heal it? In the Gospel we read that times will come when “people will faint from fear and apprehension because of what’s to be coming to the inhabited world” (Luke 21:26). These times have already come on the other side of the border and they are coming to us too. And to blame are those who could have prevented this but did not — the thinkers and writers, like R. Rolland, who with the vile platitude that out of evil born are goodness and happiness have silenced their conscience and now cannot hear the moaning of their neighbors being tortured and murdered there in Russia. Guilty are the journalists who take slogans from the streets and shape public opinion through the press. Guilty are those blinded by greed who do business with the devil. And the most guilty are the governments, which, bowing before and seeking mercy of the Moscow madmen, are thus writing their own death sentence.

Is it possible to reverse the effects of this thoughtless carelessness? Is it possible to fight off the invasion of the powers of darkness? I do not know, but it is clear that we are going to be put to a hard test. Perhaps some of us will become martyrs. Those who are and want to be Christ’s regiment — the Gens Santa [the unwavering clan] — should be ready.

1 Friedrich Muckermann (1883‒1946) — German Jesuit, pastor, journalist and writer, in 1916 founded the Workers’ League in Vilna — the first Catholic trade union in Poland. During 1926‒1931, published the Catholic literary journal Der Gral; in the Netherlands published Der deutsche Weg — a periodical for German refugees. In 1935, began to lecture at the Institute for Oriental Studies in Rome. In 1937 began to lecture in Vienna, in 1938 in Paris, and in 1943 in Switzerland.

2 Maurice Blondel (1861‒1949) — French philosopher, representative of Catholic modernism, penned, among others: L’action. Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (1893), La pensée (1934), and Exigences philosophiques du christianisme (1950).

3 Paul of Tarsus (ca. 10‒ca. 65) — saint and apostle, the most important missionary and theologian of early Christianity, called the Apostle of Nations, author of Letters of Paul, and the main figure in Acts of the Apostles.

4 Clement of Alexandria (Titus Flavius Clemens, ca. 150‒ca. 215) — Greek philosopher and early Christian theologian, a Church Father, the first of the great early Christian apologists.

5 Lucien Laberthonnière (1860‒1932) — French philosopher and theologian, one of the main representatives of French modernism; penned, among others: Théorie de l’éducation (1901), Essais de philosophie religiouse (1903), and Positivisme et catholicisme (1911).

6 Ottokár Prohászka (1858‒1927) — Hungarian Roman Catholic clergyman; diocesan bishop in Székesfehérvar; considered the greatest figure in 20th-century Hungarian Catholicism; leader of the Catholic revival at the turn of the century; known for his retreats, sermons, and theological works translated into many languages.

7 Hermann Platz (1880‒1945) — German humanist and philosopher of culture.

8 Hermann Bahr (1863‒1934) — Austrian writer and literary critic.

9 Ildefons Herwegen (1874‒1946) — German Benedictine; historian, and liturgist founder of the abbey in Maria Laach, whose abbot he became in 1918; one of the leaders of the German liturgical movement.