Mother Damp Earth

Tatiana Goricheva

Translated from
Татьяна Горичева. Блажен иже и скоты милует. Санкт-Петербург: Алетейя, 2001.

Tatiana Goricheva is an Orthodox philosopher, writer, and activist, born in 1947 in Leningrad. She graduated from the philosophy faculty of Leningrad State University and became involved in the Christian dissident movement in the 1970s, co-founding the first Christian women’s group in the USSR. In 1980, she was expelled from the Soviet Union for her religious and human rights activities. She lived and studied in Germany (at a Jesuit institute) and in France (at the Orthodox St. Sergius Institute in Paris). Her writings, situated at the intersection of theology, existential philosophy, and feminist critique, gained wide recognition in Europe. Her books explore spiritual life, the body, suffering, animals, and ecology, from a deeply rooted Orthodox perspective.

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“The silence of the earth seemed to merge with that of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars… Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly, as if cut down, flung himself to the ground. He didn’t know why he embraced it; he couldn’t explain why he was seized with an uncontrollable urge to kiss it all over — but he did, weeping, sobbing, flooding it with tears, and in ecstasy he vowed to love it forever. ‘Drench the earth with your tears of joy and love these tears,’ sounded in his soul. What was he weeping for? Oh, he wept in his ecstasy even for those stars, shining down at him from the abyss, and he ‘was not ashamed of this ecstasy.’
It was as if the threads from all those innumerable worlds of God had converged at once in his soul, and it quivered, ‘touching other worlds.’ He wanted to forgive everyone and everything and to ask forgiveness — not for himself, oh no, but for all, for everything, for all things; and ‘for me others are already praying,’ rang again in his soul. He fell to the ground a weak youth, and rose a fighter strong for life, knowing and feeling it all at once in that same moment of his ecstasy. And never, never could Alyosha forget that moment for the rest of his life.”

(Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

Alyosha Karamazov becomes a warrior for the Lord’s cause through his communion with the earth; Raskolnikov finds liberation from his inner hell by asking forgiveness of the earth; the lame girl preaches the same “religion” of Mother-Damp-Earth. And their souls, in trembling, touch other worlds. Some kind of initiation occurs in those who partake of the mystery of the earth: they rise transformed, reborn, uplifted, different.

If this is “paganism,” it is deeply Christian, for the Lord Jesus Christ has quickened in His spiritual body the entire body of the earth. In the Eucharist, the body of the earth becomes the body of resurrection. Orthodox cosmology is geocentric precisely because it is Christocentric. In Christ, the metaphysical heaven and the pan-cosmic earth are joined. The farthest solar systems are but cosmic dust circling the Cross.

“And His voice was as the sound of many waters… and He had in His right hand seven stars” (Revelation 1:16). The earth is not merely a planet; —it is pan-cosmic; it symbolically discloses humanity’s relationship to the planets, the galaxies, and beyond. The world must become a bridal chamber, a temple, a eucharistic gift.

(See Olivier Clément, Le Christ, terre des vivants.)

Among many peoples, with no historical contact between them, the earth is considered the mother of all humans. The earliest evidence of human culture and religion is dedicated to the Mother. The oldest cultic figurines of the Paleolithic depict mother goddesses. All life is born of the Mother and nourished by her. She is the cosmic archetypal human. The earth comes first; she embodies the maternal principle.

Among many peoples, there is a custom of burying small children (those who die before a certain age — two months, for example, in India) in the earth, while all others are cremated. Burying children reflects a hope for swift resurrection, a rebirth from the soil. There is also the belief in many cultures that the soul of the dead inevitably returns to the earth. In many cultures, both newborns and the dying are laid in the earth. The midwife is called “earth mother.” The eternal cycle of “die and become” is bound up with Mother Earth.

The cult of Mother Earth was widespread: on Olympus, in Delphi, in Athens they honored Gaia. In Asia Minor she was called Astarte, Diana; in Egypt, Isis.

The connection between man and earth is also spoken of in the biblical tradition: Adam was taken from the earth. He is the archetypal “earthly being.” Only later came today’s man and woman (Gen. 2:7). But in the Old Testament, the earth is no longer the mother of humankind — only the raw material for its formation. The patriarchal monotheism of Yahweh displaced the matriarchal pantheism of earlier religions through a masculine interpretation of creation. The structure remained — “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” — but the subject changed.

The symbol of the wheat grain remains:

“But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die”

(1 Corinthians 15:35–36).

In his two books on the earth — The Earth and the Reveries of Will and The Earth and the Reveries of Repose — the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard gives a detailed account of the archetype of “earth.” In reading these books, one cannot help but sense how differently the people of the West and the people of Russia understand “earth.”

Bachelard writes of earth as something solid and resistant. Earth is a partner of our will, because resistance requires effort.

“Dreams of earth are dreams of power and will, concentrated in the Medusa complex” (The Earth and the Reveries of Will, vol. 1, p. 12).

If one compares this to the Russian, or rather the ancient “maternal” tradition more broadly, one is struck by the contrast. Not “hostility closest to us” (as Rilke put it), not dryness, but total acceptance and softness. Mother-Damp-Earth is not characterized by frozen, Medusa-like resistance; she is moist and yielding, endlessly generous:

“When you love [the earth], when you water and feed her with your sweat and labor, she never deceives. If you plunge your hands into her, right now, you’ll always find something to eat. She once marveled, still very young, at the earth’s reckless generosity: receiving a tiny seed, it gave back a massive turnip; a single poppy seed turned into a great capsule filled with thousands of seeds. And she rejoiced at the reliability of human life, served by such a bountiful being. The scent of soil, the smell of fresh greenery — these were for her tangible signs of the goodness of being.”

(Anatoly Kim, The Onion Field)

And alongside such artistic testimony, there is the scientific perspective of Soviet agronomist Vasily Robertovich Williams:

“Soil makes a finite amount of elements infinite. This is because it participates in a number of biospheric cyclical processes. Elements in soil can engage in practically unlimited interactions, forming an almost infinite number of connections.”

Bachelard’s idea of a willful, violent relationship to the earth (an idea echoed earlier in Schopenhauer’s association of matter with will) has revealed itself today to be criminal — and not only today. Orthodox Russia once knew pity for the earth. Here is a ritual confession to the earth:

“That I tore your bosom
With sharp, rending plowshare,
That I did not roll you with care,
Nor comb you with an orderly rake,
But tore your breast with a heavy harrow,
With iron teeth rusted through —
Forgive me, little mother,
Forgive your sinful breadgiver,
For the sake of Christ the Savior,
For the sake of the Most Holy Mother of God.”

There’s no need to speak at length about what has happened to the earth, to nature as a whole, turned into an object of Promethean predation. Thank God, we live in an age of ecological awareness and repentance.

The modern world is mired in the whoredom of labor, surrendered to the fetishism of work. It is a world of hysterical, unceasing activity. And here, will is bound to reason — a link long observed. As Nietzsche wrote, the will desires eternal return. And as Heidegger commented, eternal return is the return of the laws of logic. Reason can only grasp the past — only what has come to a halt. The mechanical character of today’s Euro-American civilization is the product of glorifying will and reason. Yet the earth is inaccessible to enterprising Faust, to “daring” Prometheus, to the indifferent “man without qualities.” Earth reveals herself to tears, to defenselessness, to pliancy. She calls out to what is irrational in man.

According to Bachelard, the response to “the hardness of matter” is the clenched worker’s hand, the strength of the fist. Labor is one of matter’s attributes. Work most precisely and concretely indicates the cause-and-effect chains that govern the world. These thoughts of Bachelard are typical of the Western attitude toward reality. For the Western thinker, to exist means to crash against a boundary. The negative inspires both thought and life. But the Orthodox, Eastern tradition is different. Here it is not “opposition” that determines the direction of consciousness. In Orthodox iconography there are no shadows; in Orthodox asceticism there are no murky, ambiguous transitions from evil to good, or from good to evil. Here one grows “from strength to strength” and is transfigured “from light to light.”

The ascetic-Orthodox relationship to the earth is aristocratic. Hierarchy — even in labor — is unbroken. The earth remains the mother-nourisher. One begs her forgiveness. In Bachelard’s terms, master and slave reverse roles (following Hegel’s formula: through absolute fear and labor, the slave ultimately becomes the master). The spiritual-aristocratic attitude is based on differentiation — that is, on non-mixing (as Derrida, Deleuze, and others have noted). The slave remains the slave of God; the master remains a master, while being, in Gospel terms, the servant of all. Just as the lady-earth unfailingly serves us all.

As already stated, for Bachelard earth and matter symbolize causal chains. Today, the falsity of this assertion becomes increasingly obvious. Earth has become something small (in the age of cosmic speeds), she is more defenseless than ever, naked. In the face of today’s and tomorrow’s many catastrophes, the earth appears as a whole. A holistic approach now reigns not only in New Age theories. Cause and effect reverse their roles — or vanish altogether — because the event happens within the fullness of the whole.

But Bachelard offers not only “reveries of will” but also “reveries of repose” — ideas we may well find useful: about the simplicity of the earth, her intimacy, the infinitesimally small of the earthly. These thoughts lead us directly to the connection between earth and the Church.

The symbol of the cosmic proto-human passed into Christianity. The immediate point of contact was Stoic cosmology, where the world is the visible body of the invisible God, and God is the invisible soul of the visible world.

Yet the emphasis shifted: the idea of the proto-cosmic human is found not so much in the symbols of creation as in Christian concepts of salvation.

“In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:
Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature:
For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
And he is the head of the body, the Church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.
For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell;
And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.”

(Colossians 1:14–20)

A cosmic liturgy unfolds — Christ becomes the head, the universe His body; the unity of creation is revealed as the unity of one person, the cosmic Adam. (See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie; Jürgen Moltmann, Gott in der Schöpfung.)

The Church, “which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all” (Ephesians 1:23), becomes “the mother of all the faithful.” The symbol of the Church is the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, who sanctifies even the mother-earth. As Saint Cyprian said:

“He cannot have God for his Father who does not have the Church for his Mother.
From her womb we were born, by her milk we were nourished, by her spirit we are quickened.”

Today the Church can be compared to a living organism even more aptly than in the time of the Apostle Paul, the Ecumenical Councils, or Khomiakov.

We now see that the death of God and the extinguishing of the Spirit have led to the death of all living things — for only the Holy Spirit gives life. Forests and waters, birds and fish, poets and dreamers, children and angels — all share in a common misfortune. The age of technology (with an enormous leap in the past thirty years) has objectified the last islands of spontaneity, intuition, instinct. The computer has driven out imagination. The artificial has replaced the natural. And in many Western churches it has grown cold. “Institution,” bureaucracy, has triumphed even there.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has always carried within itself more of the maternal spirit (the Spirit of the Mother of God); it has always been more “Marian” than “Petrine.” And today, her warm, cave-like world — a world of flickering lampadas, natural tears, and mysterious chant — allows one to forget that somewhere there is a dehumanized kingdom of neon, glass, and concrete.

In our time, even thinkers far from Christianity — such as Heidegger — arrive at this insight:

“Spirit as the spirit of life must be more plant than the plant itself, more animal than the animal.”

(Commentaries on the Poetry of Hölderlin)

The Spirit that lives in the Church of God is comprehended only from within. A new “philosophy of life” is needed here, a new division between inner and outer. The Mother of God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Anyone who has ever encountered this experiential reality in prayer will testify that knowledge of the Mother of God and of the Church is the most intimate of all human knowledge.

By “inner,” of course, we do not mean psychological experience — not the experience of passions, regression, or romanticism. This inner life is intentional. Its source always lies outside the self — in Revelation, in Grace, in the Mysteries. But this inner life cannot be objectified, ideologized, turned into a mechanism. Organic ecclesiality is formed through the continual irruption of the Holy Spirit. If there can be a “philosophy of the Church,” its method will be the opposite of Fichte’s and Hegel’s. Fichte’s subject generates history and reality out of itself. Fichte is driven by the pathos of outward conquest, of megalomaniacal thrust toward the infinitely large.

The infinitely small of the Church is symbolized in the Eucharist. The “atom” of the Eucharist overturns the whole world. The infinitely small of the Church is also symbolized in the image of the Mother of God — the most “invisible,” silent, and meek. And yet,

“Thy womb is more spacious than the heavens.”

She contained within herself not only the whole universe but the One who is greater than the universe.

If Fichte’s philosophy has no end and must be infinitely expanded and completed, the philosophy of the Church is content with the smallest of things: a fragment, a gesture, a moment. In every cell of organic ecclesial life the whole Church is reflected. In every fragment, the entire liturgy; in every movement of a churchly person, their churchliness is seen. Paul Evdokimov spoke of the “Orthodox instinct.” A churchly person unmistakably recognizes another churchly person.

In the second half of the twentieth century, this is especially vital — to love not only God, but specifically the Church, for the Holy Spirit is incarnate here in all concrete power. Through the Church, any other life can also be reborn:

“Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord.”

As I travel the world delivering lectures on the Russian Church, I encounter everywhere people who feel precisely her — the Church. By the light in their eyes I see that in Western Europe, too, the knowledge of her has not died. Interest in politics, dissidence, feminism, Marxism, the abstract search for “the meaning of life” — all that is in the past. But more and more palpably, a brotherhood of those who live in the Church is being felt.

As has been said many times, the Church cannot be explained. It is something absolutely simple — hence the special intimacy of the church experience. To say anything about this simplest “substance,” one would have to constantly exaggerate and poetize, fall into baroque and other extremes. For only thus, through a flood of apophatic speech, can one point to its opposite: simplicity. Of course, we must not forget the cataphatic language of Revelation either — but that is a special and rare case.

We can say that we live in the age of the Holy Spirit. Not in the sense of Joachim of Fiore, or Merezhkovsky, or Ernst Bloch. Such a predominance of the Spirit in our time can be interpreted only metaphorically. This is a radically apocalyptic age — an age of choosing between life and death. And that choice is real not only for Christians. If once science was thought to be neutral, today more and more scientists are bewildered — and many Western scientists, alas mostly Western, are ashamed to be scientists at all. Nature is no longer just a “background” for rest or travel — through it the Spirit speaks. Today’s empiricism is apocalyptic in itself. To the mechanistic Euro-American civilization and the functionalism of its sterile institutions stands opposed, as never before, the primal freshness and virginity of what remains of the natural world. Novelty and wonder — that is what draws us to the ever-renewing earth, ageless, generous, fruit-bearing. Today it brings paradise and life. Today, more than ever, it symbolizes the life-giving Holy Spirit.

“Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee” (Job 12:8).