The illogic of love

A new book has been released by Granat Publishing, written by Georgy Velikanov, an altar server of the Moscow Church of the All-Merciful Savior, who eight years ago pushed a drunken, resisting homeless man onto the platform out of harm’s way and was himself killed by an oncoming train.

That story shocked many people at the time. It shocked me too, especially in how sharply it revealed the illogic of Christian love.

That day, Georgy had just passed all his exams at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University, was awaiting ordination, and was hurrying home to share the joy with his wife.

The homeless man who had stumbled onto the tracks near Krasnogorskaya Station was so drunk that he fiercely fought off Velikanov’s attempt to help him. After Georgy’s death, the man stole his cell phone from his pocket and died a month later of alcohol poisoning.

They say, however, that before he died he visited the Church of the All-Merciful Savior several times (including, allegedly, to return the stolen phone).

Georgy Velikanov’s act is utterly inexplicable from the standpoint of human logic (which is why, out of all the people standing on the platform, he alone tried to save the homeless man). And at the same time, the act is astonishingly evangelical in its core.

Human logic finds no meaning in death. The instinct of self-preservation screams that nothing is more important than staying alive. From the standpoint of common sense, even the death of Jesus appears illogical: why willingly endure torture and an agonizing death when one has legions of angels at hand and a power capable of moving mountains – of ruling the universe?

The death of Christ is the most vivid, though not the only, illogical episode of the Gospel.

Consider the parable of the shepherd who leaves his flock in the wilderness to search for the one lost sheep. He essentially abandons ninety-nine obedient sheep in a desert full of wolves and robbers. And won’t he end up searching for the entire flock once he returns?

No less illogical is Mary’s act, which Jesus praises. She pours a pound of costly ointment onto His feet – ointment worth a year’s wages for an ordinary laborer. From a human point of view, Judas is right: could that money not have saved some starving person from death?

Equally strange is the story of the poor widow who placed two small coins in the temple treasury. Is her poverty and loneliness not enough to find favor with God? Why give everything you have into a bottomless church coffer and condemn yourself to hunger?

And the parable of the workers of the eleventh hour! Who would go to work for a landowner who makes no distinction between those who labored all day and those who worked a single hour? And if someone did go, would he put in any effort, knowing he would receive the same reward anyway?

And in the end, from the standpoint of this parable: why sacrifice yourself when the same reward can be earned in a far easier way?

No matter how hard one tries, there is no earthly, practical logic in these episodes. They are held together by a singular logic – or rather, an anti-logic – of Love, incomprehensible to someone who does not possess it. Its heroes follow the prompting of the heart. Just as Jesus did when He healed the ear of the servant who came to arrest Him.

Love does not calculate and does not strategize. It acts according to the heart’s impulse, does not ponder the consequences, and seeks no benefit (and the Apostle Paul has said enough about that). Perhaps that is the only thing that unites all these episodes – both the Gospel ones and the one that unfolded at Krasnogorskaya Station.

Which is why attempts to fit the Gospel into a neat theoretical framework, to interpret it as a systematic dogmatic structure or a comprehensive worldview, feel so pointless.

A pure, loving heart is always closer to God than even the sharpest intellect. And therefore the only possible path to God is imitation of Him in love. “For God so loved the world…”

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And yet, hidden within this reflection on the illogic of love and imitation of God is the danger of distortion. For example, when the death of soldiers on the battlefield is presented as a “sacrificial deed.” Their deaths are compared to the death of Christ. But it is precisely His death that exposes the falseness of such a comparison.

The key point is Christ’s choice – His refusal to resist in any form. His refusal to summon “legions of angels,” and His refusal to accept Peter’s defense.

He even heals the ear of the servant who came to seize Him: His sacrifice is incompatible with violence. And this is not a sudden impulse but a consistent stance.

Earlier, He also forbids His disciples from calling down fire on the Samaritan village that refused to receive Him:

“The Son of Man did not come to destroy people’s lives but to save them” (Lk. 9:56).

And this despite the fact that the “path of force” would have preserved the lives of the apostles and early Christians and accelerated the emergence of a Christian empire far more powerful than Rome or Byzantium. It would have carried the Name of God and His law to the ends of the universe.

If only Christ had chosen the path of force…

And that is where the falsehood lies in Patriarch Kirill’s sermons today, as well as the sermons of all “imperial” patriarchs before him. And perhaps, it is the falsehood of the very idea of joining heaven with earth – Church with state, the way of love with the way of power.

Looking deeper, this is the very duality that tears the Church apart – the Church that tries to stand with one foot in the Kingdom of Heaven and the other on earth.

Refusal of the path of force leads the Church to the Cross. Acceptance of that path casts it into the arms of the antichrist. One cannot live in the world without compromise. But did Christ make compromises?

Strictly speaking, only the Christians of the first centuries truly walked the path of Christ and the apostles. They saw the transience and brevity of earthly life and “longed for eternal life.” Their aim was not to “save the Church,” “build a Christian empire,” or “change the world,” but to remain faithful to Christ while awaiting the end of the world and His return.

Christianity is eschatological at its core. And therefore inapplicable to practical life. Its final point lies beyond life itself. It is an image of the “coming Kingdom of Light,” but any attempt to establish it on earth turns that earth into hell.

It seems logical to me that today’s Russian Orthodox turn back to pre-Christian, Old Testament values. They are more practical than the Gospel. Within their framework one can build an earthly kingdom. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” – what could be more logical or more comprehensible?

But love is always illogical. It belongs to monks and to the enamored. What good is it to anyone else?