‘And so now we ought to acquit him?’
No, quite the contrary: now is precisely the time we must tell the truth and call evil evil; in return, we must ourselves take on half the burden of the sentence. We will enter the courtroom with the thought that we, too, are guilty. This pain of the heart, which everyone so fears now and which we will take with us when we leave the court, will be punishment for us. If this pain is genuine and severe, then it will purge us and make us better. And when we have made ourselves better, we will also improve the environment and make it better. And this is the only way it can be made better.
But to flee from our own pity and acquit everyone so as not to suffer ourselves – why, that’s too easy. Doing that, we slowly and surely come to the conclusion that there are no crimes at all, and ‘the environment is to blame’ for everything. We inevitably reach the point where we consider crime even a duty, a noble protest against the environment. ‘Since society is organized in such a vile fashion, one can’t get along in it without protest and without crimes.’ ‘Since society is organized in such a vile fashion, one can only break out of it with a knife in hand.’ So runs the doctrine of the environment, as opposed to Christianity which, fully recognizing the pressure of the environment and having proclaimed mercy for the sinner, still places a moral duty on the individual to struggle with the environment and marks the line where the environment ends and duty begins.
In making the individual responsible, Christianity thereby acknowledges his freedom. In making the individual dependent on every flaw in the social structure, however, the doctrine of the environment reduces him to an absolute nonentity, exempts him totally from every personal moral duty and from all independence, reduces him to the lowest form of slavery imaginable. If that’s so, then if a man wants some tobacco and has no money, he can kill another to get some tobacco. And why not? An educated man, who suffers more keenly than an uneducated one from unsatisfied needs, requires money to satisfy them. So why shouldn’t he kill an uneducated man if he has no other way of getting money? Haven’t you listened to the voices of the defence lawyers: ‘Of course,’ they say, ‘the law has been violated; of course he committed a crime in killing this uneducated man. But, gentlemen of the jury, take into consideration that . . .’ And so on. Why such views have almost been expressed already, and not only ‘almost’ . . .
‘But you, however,’ says someone’s sarcastic voice, ‘you seem to be charging the People with subscribing to the latest theory of the environment; but how on earth did they get that theory? Sometimes these jurors sitting there are all peasants, and every one of them considers it a mortal sin to eat meat during the fasts. You should have just accused them squarely of harbouring social tendencies.’
‘Of course, you’re right – what do they care about ‘environment,’ the peasants as a whole, that is?’ I think to myself. ‘But still, these ideas float about in the air; there is something pervasive about an idea . . .’
‘Listen to that, now!’ laughs the sarcastic voice.
‘But what if our People are particularly inclined toward this theory of the environment, by their very nature, or by their Slavic inclinations, if you like? What if they are the best raw material in Europe for those who preach such a doctrine?’
The sarcastic voice guffaws even louder, but it’s a bit forced.
No, this is still only a trick someone is pulling on the People, not a ‘philosophy of the environment.’ There’s a mistake here, a fraud, and a very seductive fraud.
One can explain this fraud, using an example at least, as follows:
Let’s grant that the People do call criminals ‘unfortunates’ and give them pennies and bread. What do they mean by doing that, and what have they meant over the course of perhaps some centuries? Is it Christian truth or the truth of the ‘environment?’ Here is precisely where we find the stumbling block and the place where the lever is concealed which the propagator of ‘the environment’ could seize upon to effect.
Some ideas exist that are unexpressed and unconscious but that simply are strongly felt; many such ideas are fused, as it were, with the human heart. They are present in the People generally, and in humanity taken as a whole. Only while these ideas lie unconscious in peasant life and are simply felt strongly and truly can the People live a vigorous ‘living life.’ The whole energy of the life of the People consists in the striving to bring these hidden ideas to light. The more obstinately the People cling to them, the less capable they are of betraying their instincts, the less inclined they are to yield to diverse and erroneous explanations of these ideas – the stronger, more steadfast, and happier they are. Among such ideas concealed within the Russian People – the ideas of the Russian People – is the notion of calling a crime a misfortune and the criminal an unfortunate.
This notion is purely Russian. It has not been observed among any European people. In the West it’s proclaimed only by some philosophers and thinkers. But our People proclaimed it long before their philosophers and thinkers. It does not follow, however, that the People would never be led astray at least temporarily or superficially by some thinker’s false interpretation of this idea. The ultimate interpretation and the last word will remain, undoubtedly, always the People’s, but in the short term this might not be the case.
To put it briefly, when they use the word ‘unfortunate,’ the People are saying to the ‘unfortunate’ more or less as follows:
‘You have sinned and are suffering, but we, too, are sinners. Had we been in your place we might have done even worse. Were we better than we are, perhaps you might not be in prison. With the retribution for your crime you have also taken on the burden for all our lawlessness. Pray for us, and we pray for you. But for now, unfortunate ones, accept these alms of ours; we give them that you might know we remember you and have not broken our ties with you as a brother.’
You must agree that there is nothing easier than to apply the doctrine of ‘environment’ to such a view: ‘Society is vile, and therefore we too are vile; but we are rich, we are secure, and it is only by chance that we escaped encountering the things you did. And had we encountered them, we would have acted as you did. Who is to blame? The environment is to blame. And so there is only a faulty social structure, but there is no crime whatsoever.’
And the trick I spoke of earlier is the sophistry used to draw such conclusions.
No, the People do not deny there is crime, and they know that the criminal is guilty. The People know that they also share the guilt in every crime. But by accusing themselves, they prove that they do not believe in ‘environment’; they believe, on the contrary, that the environment depends completely on them, on their unceasing repentance and quest for self-perfection. Energy, work, and struggle – these are the means through which the environment is improved. Only by work and struggle do we attain independence and a sense of our own dignity. ‘Let us become better, and the environment will be better.’ This is what the Russian People sense so strongly but do not express in their concealed idea of the criminal as an unfortunate.
Now imagine if the criminal himself, hearing from the People that he is an ‘unfortunate,’ should consider himself only an unfortunate and not a criminal. In that case the People will renounce such a false interpretation and call it a betrayal of the People’s truth and faith.
I could offer some examples of this, but let us set them aside for the moment and say the following.
The criminal and the person planning to commit a crime are two different people, but they belong to the same category. What if the criminal, consciously preparing to commit a crime, says to himself: ‘There is no crime!’ Will the People still call him an ‘unfortunate’?
Perhaps they would; in fact they certainly would. The People are compassionate, and there is no one more unfortunate than one who has even ceased to consider himself a criminal: he is an animal, a beast. And what of it if he does not even understand that he is an animal and has crippled his own conscience? He is only doubly unfortunate. Doubly unfortunate, but also doubly a criminal. The People will feel compassion for him but will not renounce their own truth. Never have the People, in calling a criminal an ‘unfortunate,’ ceased to regard him as a criminal! And there could be no greater misfortune for us than if the People agreed with the criminal and replied to him: ‘No, you are not guilty, for there is no “crime”’!
Such is our
