Lev Gumilev as an Orthodox materialist

L.N. Gumilev not only professed Orthodoxy all his life, but at one time (in the 1930s) he even intended to become a priest, realizing that such a “choice of profession” would become the beginning of the path to Christian martyrs. If he found out that one of the people close to him was not baptized, then he tried to convince him or to accept the Orthodox faith. The first student of Gumilyov, now a well -known historian and philologist Gelian Mikhailovich Prokhorov, recalled that Gumilyov acted in such cases a personal example.

“I was looking at him, how he differs from most people and from me too,” said Prokhorov . - And then I realized that Vera. Vera, which gave, as it were, an additional personality measurement. I am flat, but he still has a vertical one. <...> I myself over time asked him to be my godfather and was baptized by a relatively adult under his influence. "

Even before, in the first post -war years, Gumilev contributed to the baptism of his friend Maryana Gordon: he convinced him to accept Orthodoxy and became her godmother. Before the rite, it turned out that Maryana forgot the cross and money, she cried. Gumilev was not at a loss: “Wait here! Where is you lying? " "I said. He went, returned home himself, and then all the way to the Spaso-Premium firmly held my hand, ”she recalled.

Lev Nikolaevich was not afraid to profess Orthodoxy in the investigator’s office.

From the materials of the interrogation of L.N. Gumilyov:

“ Gumilev: I am deeply religious.

Investigator: What does this mean?

Gumilev: I believe in the existence of God, soul and afterlife. As a religious person, I visited the church where I prayed.

Investigator: Did you engage in religious propaganda?

Gumilev: I do not deny that conversations of a religious nature With my loved ones and acquaintances, I led. There was such a fact when in 1948 I, by virtue of my religious beliefs, played the role of the godfather at the baptism of one of my friends-assistant librarian of the Leningrad library named after Saltykov-Shchedrin Gordon Maryana Lvovna. With this very Gordon, with my assistance crossed from the Jewish faith to the Orthodox ...

Investigator: What is the Soviet scientist, you are obscurantist.

Gumilev: To a certain extent it is. ”

Gumilev went to the temple, confessed and communed. In a word, he led the life of a real Orthodox Christian. And at the same time, his religious views were very unusual for the Orthodox Christian. In essence, his religiosity was subordinated to the scientific worldview.

Scientific views of L.N. Gumilyov began to form in the second half of the 1920s, when he read old gymnasium textbooks, prepared at one time by pre-revolutionary positivist historians. Finally, his scientific views developed at the History Faculty of Leningrad University, where again most of his teachers (I.N. Vinnikov, V.V. Struve, S.I. Kovalev, S.Ya. Lurie, N.V. Küner, A.Ya. Yakubovsky, E.V. Tarle) adhered to positivist views.

The basis of the positivist worldview is the installation of the cognitiveness of the material world with scientific methods and on the universality of the scientific (primarily of natural science) knowledge. Contrary to the widespread opinion, the “passionate theory of ethnogenesis” created by Gumilev is completely materialistic. Gumilev tried to find the natural science justification of the phenomena of world history that interests him. Is it a successful question. He even tried to make ethnology a natural science.

At the same time, Gumilyov had a rather rich mystical experience, which he himself interpreted purely materialistically. Gumilev believed in the existence of various demons-goblin, brownies, Albasians (this is such a Turkic demon), but considered these creatures a kind of bacteria or viruses. They are invisible with a simple eye, the devices created by man cannot yet find them, but the scientists began to find and study viruses with bacteria relatively recently. Someday, it will come to demons.

G.M. Prokhorov and the wife of Lev Nikolaevich Natalya Viktorovna retold a story that they heard from Gumilyov himself. It was in 1943, during the expedition to Nizhny Tunguska. Gumilev recently freed himself from the Norilsk camp, but continued to work on the camp. The working hands were so needed that former prisoners did not even let go of the army. Gumilyov, who was still in the camp years for the position of geotechnology, was sent to an exploration expedition.

He lived in the same tent with his friend, astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev, the same former zek as Gumilyov himself. Once their tent began to shake strongly, next to the tent, someone's heavy, like elephants, steps were heard. I had to get out and look around - they did not find other people's traces. But since then it went every day: an inexplicable noise next to the tent, someone's steps. And once someone is invisible, but very strong took Kozyrev by the shoulders and pushed to the toros, so much so that the astronomer broke two or three ribs. Then Gumilev guessed: “This is the Albasians,” a demon, well known to the peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia. Gumilev began to persuade the Albasians to leave: “I began to turn to the spirit. First in Russian. I feel, does not understand. Then Tatar. He does not understand. In Tunguskoy-I then spoke Tunguska. He does not understand. In French-the same thing. Then I guessed to speak with him in a percisite. Understood! I asked him to leave. Then a whirlwind flew into the tent, a strong gust of wind. <...> The flame in the lamp darted, almost went out. And he left. "

Gumilev did not doubt the existence of demons, but for him they were not mystical creatures, but part of the biosphere. His faith in them is not religious, demonology for him is rather an unrecognized industry of natural science.

These demons, however, are sharply different from Satan, who has nothing in common with them, as well as with the material world. Satan is an embodied non -existence, nothing that the positivist Gumilev correlates with a physical vacuum: “... physicists know that with intense thermodynamic processes there is a loss of a substance transforming into light energy, and the latter leaves its system into an intergalactic abyss. This is an annihilation that is not death, but worse than death. <...> The ancient sages knew this. They even personified, as was then accepted, the principle of annihilation and called him Lucifer, i.e. “Wearing light” (inaccurate translation will be more correct - the light of the light; where? - to the abyss!). And the abyss was compared with hell - the worst of everything that could be imagined. <...> Modern physics also operates on this concept, of course, calling it in its own way-a vacuum. <...> The abyss is a space without a bottom, i.e. endlessly, and therefore without the beginning. <...> Vacuum is a world without history. In each small volume of space, the pairs of “particle - antiparticles” are continuously born, but then they are mutually worshiped, annoyed, emitting the quanta of light, who, in turn, “fall to nowhere”. <...> Well, is it not hell in the understanding of the ancients who considered the immortal soul a particle of light? " (Gumilev L.N. Ethnogenesis and the Earth's biosphere).

But if Satan is non -existence, then what is God? To begin with, God is the creator of the material world, who really liked the lifeless Gumilev: "God is kind, and therefore the world created by Him, the benefits." Therefore, all normal religions, from the point of view of Gumilyov, should bless the world, and all normal people - to love the world, nature, the biosphere. The world is beautiful and very reasonably arranged, even illness and death are not evil, but a consequence of the natural order of things.

Gumilev liked to quote the Tibetan anthem, translated by the orientalist Bronislava Kuznetsov:

May the sky be sapphire!
Let the yellow sun - the world
Fill with his light
Orange-gold!
Let the nights be full
Pearl brilliance of the moon!
Let the stars and planets
The quiet light descends
And we will have a rainbow
Shines with blue fire.
Let the ocean rain,
Let there be eternal land,
Parent of good;
The fields are so green here
So many beautiful countries!

According to Archpriest Mikhail Ardov, Gumilev was completely convinced that his views did not contradict not only Christianity at all, but even to Orthodoxy, that is, the most strict, orthodox branch of Christianity.

A convinced positivist, who did not doubt the universality of scientific knowledge, Gumilyov even made religion materialistic. It is not so difficult, because Gumilyov’s god is creating being. If it is not personified, then the contradiction with science will completely disappear. Materialists believe that there is nothing in the world except matter (substance and energy), but wasn't Gumilyov the same way?

Even a big explosion is interpreted by Gumilev as a miracle of creation: “The world created by God is also supported and develops. Modern physicists-cosmologists who interpreted the creation of the world as “initial explosion”, that is, the manifestation of supermanding power ”(the law of God: initial information for younger age. / The preface by L.N. Gumilyov.-L., 1990) came to the same conclusion.

Many serious scientists believed in God, because science as a field of knowledge may not intersect with religion - the area of ​​faith. Thus, Deism was born, who adhered to many scientists and philosophers of the New Age: God created the world and gave him laws, but he does not intervene in the affairs of people, and laws - unchanging and eternal laws of nature - can be studied without looking at their creator. This is what believers did. There were other forms of coexistence of religion and science. But Gumilyov’s religious picture of the world turned out to be quite materialistic, and the concepts of biology, geography, and physicists gained a religious meaning.