Temptations From Unbelievers. Refutation of Their Foolish Arguments

May the mercy of God be with you!

Well, now! No sooner had the first burden lifted than a second was already being prepared—more subtle and more dangerous. Who was that man holding forth at your house? What a lot of lies he told, and what a heap of worthless rubbish he threw into your head! He was aiming to shake your faith—not merely to turn you away from Christ the Lord, but to make you an outright atheist. The enemy sent you such a wise and clever sage.

You have done well in resolving to avoid as much as possible all conversations with unbelievers and any encounter with them. Evil conversations corrupt good dispositions of the soul. And then you must go and struggle to restore what has been thrown into disorder. Yet there is no avoiding them entirely. These wicked creatures prowl everywhere. You look—and there he is. So in the future, proceed as follows: when you happen unexpectedly to hear something contrary to the faith, try in every way not to let what you have heard reach the heart, but to let it pass from one ear to the other. At the same time, drawing your attention away from the unbeliever’s words, take care to occupy your heart with the conviction that our faith is immutably true in all its points, and that if there are those who oppose it, it is from a failure to understand the matter. Objections can be raised against everything, even against the fact that we exist. The conviction restored in your heart, together with the thought of the shallowness of mind and the poor quality of heart of the speaker, will make your soul like a stone against which wicked words will strike and bounce back without leaving a trace. If, despite all this, something harmful has still lodged in your soul, turn to prayer at once, as you did at the monastery of St. Sergius: call upon your Guardian Angel, the Mother of God, and above all upon the Lord Savior Himself. They will dispel the darkness that has been breathed upon you. Afterward, either think through the troubling doubt yourself, or look for a refutation of it in some book, or speak with someone about it—but make sure, one way or another, to leave not a trace of it in your soul. A remaining trace will continually muddy the soul and, as it were, toss stones underfoot of one who is trying to walk.

Do write to me as well. You did well in writing out everything you heard. Even though you were not shaken and everything that had lodged in your thoughts from those speeches has now passed, I will nevertheless say a word or two against them.

“Education drills faith into a person.” It does not drill it in—it develops it and gives it a definite form. Every newborn enters a society that has its faith. The faith of that society becomes his faith, as does everything else. But the capacity for faith and the soul’s need for it are not drilled in by society. It is the same as with knowledge: society through upbringing transmits to its new member the knowledge it has accumulated, but does not give him the capacity to know. That capacity is an inalienable property of the soul. So too, faith in the existence of God and His providential rule is an inalienable property of the spirit, which manifests with power in every person as soon as his faculties develop. Society transmits only the form of its own faith—not the believing power itself, nor the need for it.

Society drills faith in through upbringing. But how did faith get into society in the first place? Everything that enters society comes out of the soul. Society is a repository—a kind of basin into which everything that flows from the soul collects. Thus, faith exists in society because it first exists in the soul. It came out of the soul and settled in society. Faith is older than society and the family, and consequently older than upbringing itself. Upbringing gives to the newborn what was first brought into the family and society from the soul.

Therefore, be so good as to establish more firmly in your mind the conviction that upbringing develops only what is already present in human nature, but introduces nothing new into it. If it develops faith, it is because faith belongs to human nature. No one could teach a person to know God and to worship Him if it were not an inescapable law lying in the human spirit. And we see that throughout the entire human race there is faith. Even among the most primitive peoples it exists, because without it a human being is not a human being. If some among the highly educated do not believe, this does not mean that they have stepped far ahead or soared to great heights; it means that they have stepped outside of human nature, have distorted and disfigured themselves—as someone might who gouged out his own eyes or cut off his nose. If all people possess faith, then the norm of human life necessarily includes faith. Consequently, whoever lacks faith is departing from that norm and is a moral monster—and that is the rank of all unbelievers.

“A man who from childhood falls among animals becomes like them.” This was written in French stories and novels of the end of the last century. Whether anything of the sort ever actually occurred, I do not know. A human being is a human being everywhere. Even if he were to grow up among animals, he would inevitably claim everything that is his. But suppose it did happen as they say; take that man who grew up among animals, and a couple of those animals as well, and bring them into human society. Within a week you will see how far the man advances beyond the animals. Why? Because the germs of a higher life are in him. And faith will appear in him too. It is already there, but obscured and suppressed. At the first promptings it will awaken and soon come into full strength. The animals, meanwhile, will remain animals.

Unbelievers who have stepped outside the norm of human nature habitually turn to abnormalities in order to confirm their unbelief. Such is their reference—besides the upbringing of a human being among animals, which they invented—to those who are simple-minded from birth. And what things they do not say at that point! There is no God, and there is no soul. And yet, reasoning soundly, one ought to draw no conclusions from such cases, because those very cases are as yet unexplained. Here is how you might reason about them. The soul is present in these people just as in all other people, but it does not have the means to fully manifest itself: it is bound. Apply this to the following workings of God’s Providence. It sometimes happens that a certain danger threatens someone because of circumstances that will interweave ahead of him, if he is an actor in them. God sends him an illness, and while he lies in bed, those circumstances pass without his involvement. In this way he is saved from disaster. Had he been healthy, he would inevitably have become entangled in those events and fallen into trouble. Reason in the same way about those who are simple-minded from birth. Their souls are bound for the entire period of their earthly existence, because if they were unbound, there would be no end of disasters—both for others and for themselves. In the other life it will be revealed that this is so. Their souls will pass there as the souls of infants who die in childhood. Whether or not such a belief will be vindicated, we shall see in the next world. But in the next world any objection can be settled that can be settled at all. In this world nothing can be concluded from such cases.

I will not touch upon the other absurdities you heard. You yourself have understood them well. ”See then that you walk carefully, not as unwise but as wise” (Eph. 5:15).

The Lord bless you!