In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good; they then seek to carry this good back into life, hoping to make life itself accord with their inner image of good. But life never changes to accord with an image of good; instead it is the image of good that sinks into the mire of life – to lose its universality, to split into fragments and be exploited by the needs of the day. People are wrong to see life as a struggle between good and evil. Those who most wish for the good of humanity are unable to diminish evil by one jot.
Great ideas are necessary to dig new channels, to remove stones and, to bring down cliffs and fell forests; dreams of universal good are necessary in order that great waters should flow in harmony … Yes, if the sea were able to think, then every storm would make its waters dream of happiness. Each wave breaking against a cliff would believe it was dying for the good of the sea; it would never occur to it that, like thousands of waves before and after, it had only been brought into being by the wind
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I have seen the unshakeable strength of the idea of social good that was born in my own country. I saw this struggle during the period of general collectivization and again in 1937. I saw people annihilated in the name of an idea as fine and humane as the ideal of Christianity. I saw whole villages dying of hunger; I saw peasant children dying in the snows of Siberia; I saw trains bound for Siberia with hundreds and thousands of men and women from Moscow, Leningrad and every city in Russia – men and women who had been declared enemies of a great and bright idea of social good. This idea was fine and noble – yet it killed some without mercy, crippled the lives of others, and separated wives from husbands and children from fathers.
Now the horror of German Fascism has arisen. The air is full of the cries and groans of the condemned. The sky has turned black; the sun has been extinguished by the smoke of the gas ovens. And even these crimes, crimes never before seen in the universe have been committed in the name of good.
Once when I lived in the Northern forests, I thought that good was to be found neither in man, nor in the predatory world of animals and insects, but in the silent kingdom of the trees. Far from it! I saw the forests slow movement, the treacherous way it battled against grass and bushes for each inch of soil … First, billions of seeds fly through the air and begin to sprout destroying the grass and bushes. Then millions of victorious shoots wage war against one another. And it is only the survivors who enter into an alliance of equals to form the seamless canopy of the young deciduous forest. Beneath this canopy the spruces and beeches freeze to death in the twilight of penal servitude.
In time the deciduous trees become decrepit; then the heavyweight spruces burst through to the light, executing the alders and beeches. This is the life of the forest – a constant struggle of everything against everything.
Good is to be found neither in the sermons of religious teachers and prophets, nor in the teachings of sociologists and popular leaders nor in the ethical systems of philosophers … And yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing.
Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of the peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft.
The private kindness of one individual to another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.
But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even a mouse, even a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.
This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart – before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of the preachers, before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It as simple as life itself. Even the teachings of Jesus deprived it of its strength.
But as I lost faith in good, I began to lose faith even in kindness. It seemed as beautiful and powerless as dew. What use was it if it was not contagious?
How can one make a power of it without losing it, without turning it into a husk as the Church did? Kindness is only powerful when it is powerless. If Man tries to give it power, it dims, fades away, losses itself, vanishes.
Today I can see the true power of evil. The heavens are empty. Man is alone on the Earth. How can the flame of evil be put out? With small drops of living dew, with human kindness? No, not even the waters of all the clouds and seas can extinguish that flame – let alone a handful of dew gathered drop by drop from the time of the Gospels to the iron present …
Yes, after despairing of finding good either in God or in Nature, I began to despair even of kindness.
But the more I saw of the darkness of Fascism, the more clearly I realized that human qualities persist even on the edge of the grave, even at the door of the gas chamber.
My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man that is impotent in the struggle against evil, but that the power of evil is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This blind love is man’s meaning.
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
