"Christ is risen!--Indeed He is risen!" "Pascha, the Pascha of the Lord, the Feast of Feasts, Holy Day of holy days!" What other words can we possibly need? Indeed, "Let no one today lament his poverty, for the Kingdom has come among us."
Yet, no sooner do we hear these amazing words, rejoice in them, believe in them, when suddenly comes the realization that during this festal night, on this radiant day, in fact millions of people do not hear and possibly have never heard them. For so many people these words announce nothing, proclaim nothing. And how many, upon hearing these words, shrug their shoulders in hostility, skepticism, and cynicism? How is it possible to rejoice when so many people do not know this joy, turn away from it, and close their hearts to it? And how is it possible to explain these words and move the hearts of such persons? Again, how can we possibly prove anything to them? About such people Christ said, "even if someone were to return from the dead they would not believe." (Lk. 16:31). What can we hope to achieve with our impoverished proofs? Yet, possibly, the full triumphant power of Easter consists precisely in the fact that there is nothing here to prove, that all of man's knowledge, all human proofs are totally powerless before this reality.
At the end of the nineteenth century in the very heart of Russia, in a priestly family, we find a young boy named Sergei, "Seriozha" Bulgakov. He grows up captivated by the poetry and beauty of Church Services, with a simple, blind, direct faith. No questions, no proofs. "They didn't even occur to us," he wrote later on, "nor could they occur. . .in us children, given the extent to which we were saturated by this festive life, the extent to which we loved the temple and the beauty of its Services. How rich and profound and pure was our childhood, how our souls bathed in these heavenly rays that constantly shone on them."
But then came the time of proofs and questioning. And out of this naĂŻve and simple childhood this honest, fervent and sincere Russian boy fell into the hands of unbelief and atheism, into the world of pure proofs and intellectualism. Seriozha Bulgakov, the son of a humble cemetery priest became Professor Sergei Nikolayevich Bulgakov, one of the leaders of the progressive Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, Russian scientific Marxism. Germany, university, friendship with the leaders of Marxism, first scientific works, political economy, glory, and honor -- according to the popular phrase--before the whole of thinking Russia. If anyone struggled through that whole process of questioning and proofs, it was certainly he. If anyone achieved all scientific knowledge and its crown and glory in Marxism, then it was surely he. If there was anyone who rejected simple and irresponsible faith, then it was he again. Several years of academic glory, several voluminous books, hundreds of followers. But gradually, one after another all of these proofs began to fall apart and turn into dust, until nothing remained where they once stood. What happened to him--sickness, insanity, grief? No, nothing happened in the external circumstances of his life. What happened is that his soul, the very heart of his consciousness, ceased to accept these flat questions and equally flat answers. The questions ceased to be legitimate questions, the answers ceased to be actual answers. It suddenly became clear that all of this accumulated knowledge failed to answer anything--markets, capital, surplus value. . . what do they know and what can they possibly tell us about the human soul, about its perennial thirst, about that unquenchable desire which, at the deepest level, in its deepest recesses, can never be satisfied?
And so began a return to the sources. Not the reclaiming of a simple naĂŻve childhood faith, not a return to a nostalgic childhood. No, Sergei Bulgakov remained for his whole life an intellectual, a professor, a philosopher, only now his books began to declare something else, his inspired words began to proclaim a different reality.
I remembered him during today's Paschal joy, because it seems to me that with his whole life and with his whole experience he was more capable than most to answer: what proof can one offer? For suddenly this whole question is removed, because he of all people understood the powerlessness and the inefficacy of all these proofs. He became convinced that Easter is not found in them, nor does it derive its power from them.
Let us here his words on the day of Pascha near the end of his life: "When the doors are opened, and we enter the temple shining with gleaming lights, during the singing of that exalted Paschal Canon, our hearts are filled with an abundant joy, for Christ has risen from the dead. At that moment a Paschal miracle occurs in our hearts. For we behold Christ's resurrection; we look at the radiant Christ and approach Him, the Bridegroom, coming from the grave. We then lose awareness of our surroundings, we seem to come out of ourselves; in the silence of arrested time and the glow of the pure whiteness of Pascha all earthly colours fade, and our soul is smitten entirely with the ineffable light of the resurrection. 'Now all is filled with light, heaven and earth, and the regions below.' In the Paschal night mankind is offered a foretaste of the age to come, the possibility of entering the kingdom of glory, the kingdom of God. The language of our world has no words to express this revelation of the Paschal night, its perfect joy. Pascha is life eternal, consisting in being led by God and communion with Him. It is truth, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. This was the first word with which the resurrected Lord greeted the women disciples: 'rejoice' (Mt. 28:9); and greeting Him, the first words heard by the apostles were: 'Peace be with you' (Lk. 24:36)."
I emphasize, these words of Bulgakov are not the words of a child, the words of a simpleton, who has not yet reached the level of questions and proofs. They are the words of one who speaks after all questions have been asked, after all proofs given. This is not the proof of Pascha, this is the light, the power, and the victory of Pascha itself within man.
This is why there is nothing for us to prove on this radiant and joyful night. From the very fulness of this joy, of this knowledge, we can only proclaim to the whole world, to those who are near and to those far off: "Christ is risen! Indeed, Christ is risen!"
'O Death, Where is Thy Sting?' by Fr. Alexander Schmemann
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