The WebPage of Hieromonk Savatie Bastovoi

What I am going to do is a mosaic made of stills from the movie “The English Patient”. One would not be surprised if the result does not resemble to the famous movie that won a lot of Academy Awards. Like Nietzsche, I suppose I have a clever reader, with a certain sense of humor so that he may watch with kindness my narration of its subject (that is the narration of a person who is not watching the TV programs for there years); even this
movie, was watched from a strange position, while I was working on the computer in a friend’s house. That is why I did not intend to make a pertinent commentary (how should I make it if I did not watch the movie?) but I intended to discover the inexhaustible which lies deep within us, the way in which the very same thing can guide us directly into the privacy of our own thoughts, although this privacy differs from a person to another. I suppose that
those who watched this movie very carefully, even more times, can narrate it in a quite different way from that of a monk, because, as it seemed to me, all monks are a kind of “English patients”. This movie can even help you to
better understand the secret of monkhood, the secret of our human life. In a way, it is a movie for monks.
It begins with a common scene for those who like the commando-like movies. A young English pilot leaves the ground in his airplane, is shot down and falls on the ground. Some Muslim natives find him, lend him
assistance and take him to the hospital on a camel’s back. The next scene presents us the former pilot after some time, among other patients and nurses whose youth and thirst for life are in contradiction with the helplessness of the patients. After that, the movie takes a more prosaic turn. The hero does not recover so that he could destroy the whole German air force and the daughter of some English minister (prisoner in a German camp) does not fall in
love with him so he could kiss her in the end on the background of a glorious sunset. In one word, our hero is not a Rambo, he is more like a corpse, a pile of memories left on a hospital litter. The garrison learns that it must leave that place. The patients are loaded in trucks together with the nurses. On the road, on of the cars hits a mine and blows up. While the others are occupied with the remainders of the car, a nurse steps away and enters an abandoned church, which was not far from that place. She decides to remain there together with the English
patient “until he dies”, and after that to reach the convoy. This young and very energetic woman, devoted completely to her mission, assembles some bedclothes for her patient. From now on, the sudden presence of Christ is overwhelming in a movie in which the word “God” was pronounced only one time and then with the specification “if there is a God”. Christ appears from the devoted love of this woman for a strange half-monster, for the wounded Samaritan of the Gospel. Although He – Christ -, remains unrevealed until the end. This is the movie’s subject, the action continues around this old church. Even more precisely, the action continues within the damaged memory of this half-corpse. The audience is invited to witness a rememorizing effort from the part of an irrecoverable person. If you like, this is a movie about something that happened and never could happen again, about those woods which could exist but they will never be according to Blaga.1 When I say so I am thinking of the state that is common to everybody, beyond his aspirations and preferences. I am thinking of the irrecoverable
past and of the unknown future, of death that unites us or perhaps levels us, placing us within the undisturbed memory of History. Sometimes, the helpless body of History will make huge efforts to remember us but it will fail.
I do not want to be considered one of the followers of Ron Hubbard, the creator of “dyanetics” which propagates the infinite rememorizing of the past events until our birth and of our former existences in order to realize “our true nature”; I intend to propose a subject of meditation – a very fashionable word, in fact. It is merely a thought and a
recollection of ancient times (Psalm 142, 5) according to David, about the times when I did not exist.
Sometimes I think of the immensity of the time passed before our birth, when nobody missed us. Then, I think of the immensity of time which will elapse after our death, when, again, nobody will miss us as we do not
miss today a certain human being who lived and died thousands of years ago.
It is a great wonder that we – who are supposed to live such a short period of time - travel with our minds both through the past and through the infinite future, reliving within ourselves the history of time. My opinion is
that we can do this due to our eternal nature, which the most of us do not believe in. Saint Gregory of Nyssa was of the opinion that if someone surprises himself thinking of things and ideas he himself cannot understand,
this is the best proof that we are the image if the Almighty, who has an infinite intelligence. 2 In order to continue this meditation, we have to admit that God does exist. Those who cannot make such an effort must stop here, because the reading will seem them even more boring. The crippled body of the English patient as well as the effort he makes to recollect the past makes me think of Adam. We can image the state of mind of our ancestor after that cosmic accident which he himself provoked. I state this because the theology of That God we agreed to exist, says that with his falling, Adam provoked the falling of the whole Universe, he unleashed the sliding towards the Chaos of the entire Cosmos, movement which obsesses us even nowadays (the ozone wholes and the ecological cataclysms).
After this accident Adam became a mutant, he forgot almost everything. Adam lost the divine relationship with God, his mind darkened; we can say that he was insane. In this state of shock, Adam is chased from
Heaven. He cannot understand what is happening to him. He was made some promises he cannot understand. What does “get your bread by hard work” mean? Adam not even knew how this bread looked like; he neither worked nor sweated. All these were unknown to him while he lived in Heaven. Adam fell from light into darkness, from immortality into death and illness, from happiness into suffering, from love into solitude. He fell from
knowledgeable into unknowledgeable. He was waiting for the promised death but he knew nothing about it: neither when, nor how it will come. The Universe continued his slow movement towards destruction. In the
end, it will kill Adam himself. Nature begins the irrational revenge against its destructor: the beasts do not obey him any longer, on the contrary – they menace him everywhere; the forces of nature do not obey to his commands
as before, water drowns him, fire burns him, wind destroys his crops. Adam is a frightened ill man who must command the whole Universe. It is in this context that God reveals himself. With an untold wisdom He fetches Adam from the falling walls of the Universe that menaced to crush him. How? By death. Giving him to death, God makes Adam rebirth in another dimension, 3 by participating to the immortal body of Jesus, 4 when the
actual earth and sky will disappear and God will create for Adam a new earth and a new heaven, Isaiah, 66, 22; Apocalypse, 21, 1 which will not have the temporal and spatial dimensions already known to us. But Death is so
unknown, so frightening. Adam lived on the earth, gave birth to children, these ones gave birth to other children, up to us. The story about his falling from Heaven, with a certain God who created him from clay and then made him a woman from one of his ribs, is old fashioned and may stir a smile. How nice the ancient peoples were, they believed sincerely in this stupidity created by Jews. But nowadays, when the medical science developed a lot, when with some money one can buy a place on the Moon, how can one believe in something like that?
Eternity, life after death, I suppose that even some priests “believe” in them only to gain some money from the old ladies! What foolishness! If we watched Discovery channel, we could have seen that interesting program in which we are clearly showed that out ancestors were the monkeys. What a pity! We know neither biology, nor history; we read no books. We are not allowed to, so that we cannot learn the truth because in this case there will be no one to go to church and feed the fat priests. Here is the heaven and here is the hell; if I have food and enough drink –it’s the heaven, if I don’t – it’s the hell. What kind of heaven? No women, no parties; you sing all day long only prayers to God, what a happiness! It’s sickening; the hell is much more interesting: here, there are all the clever people, all the great artists and the “heretic” philosophers, what a good company! Anyway, devils made much better things to humankind than God, let’s not be His humble slaves any longer, but creatures capable to live by themselves. Let’s go back to our patient. He lies on an improvised bed in the abandoned church. The morning sunshines reveal the dusty angels painted in a Renaissance manner by a minor artist. On the floor there are old books, liturgical objects scattered all around. A young woman is sitting on the edge of the bed. With a great effort, the ill man tries to tell her something about Herodotus, the father of history. She does not know who Herodotus is, but she is very beautiful. And the war is outside. Let us suppose that this pile of helplessness could have children made after his image and resemblance. Let us imagine that he could tell his children his memories, about the time when he was a young pilot. But I said nothing about these memories. The patient remembers a romantic interlude with the beautiful wife of an officer, his commander, I think. What do you think, how many generations will believe in such a story? How would this story sound in the ears of an helpless monster, a story about a young and handsome ancestor who crushed the enemy planes and a beautiful woman was in love with him and that he belonged to an aristocratic family? And after that, this poor creature is told that there is a plastic surgeon that can make him by surgery be as tall and handsome as his ancestor, but in order to do this, he must believe in that surgeon. I suppose that this story would produce a lot of suffering and even disgust upon the poor man just because of its impossibility of becoming true. The crippled descendant of Adam has the same reaction. Do not bother me with your divine origin, with your eternal life! Let me live the small period of time I have to live in my own way. Why do you disturb me with such thoughts which already trouble me and which I do not know how to chase! Or perhaps do you believe I am such a fool that I do not want to live forever, you think perhaps I want to die and quit all I love on this earth? Do you suppose that I like to know that my lover will grow old and will look like the old ladies whose accidental touch in a tramcar makes me feel thick? So, please, do not turn the knife in the wound with these impossible stories. Yes, I do want to be immortal, I do want to be forever young, but this is too good to be true. This is a fruit of human despondency. Reality is even sadder, it is exactly as we can see it: we are born against our will, we grow up, we fall in love, we suffer from jealousy, we separate each other, we give birth to children, we grow old and die. It is understandable why the idea of God, the idea of religion, the idea of some prescriptions for salvation as the canons of the Orthodox Church are, creates so much repulsion in people. I do not still think there is one single person who would not like to live forever or to be young forever. Do not believe such persons; I have heard a lot of people boasting with their sick of eternity. It is rather the reaction of the fox to the grapes it could not touch. To better understand the irrational reactions that we have before any unknown situation, I always come back to the thoughts of the childhood, when our soul was not yet overwhelmed by preconceived ideas and artificial repressions. I remember the masochistic thirst with which I was asking my mother to read me some stories about all kinds of heroes killed by one of their companions of fight or travel and after three days a fairy queen resurrected them with the living water. On one hand I used to enjoy the resurrection of this Prince Charming, on the other hand I did not know where to find those red-hot coals eating horses so that I could start looking for the living water. I used to cry when listening to such stories and my mammy had to calm me down in her arms. But she never knew that I was not crying for the sad fate of the Prince Charming but for me and for her, who had to die and I had no living water. When I grew up and the only hope to find “those far, faraway mountains which unite their peaks, so high that no flying bird could reach them” vanished, so that I could not discover the living water, I began to hate any story about youth without old age and life without death, as the most sadistic instruments of torture ever created against the human being. But which of us is the real one? The one who was, the one who is, the one who will be? How easy is for us to pass from the dreams of childhood to the terribleness of the teen-age, from the existentialism of this age to the “uniform” of the family man who trembles for his job. Buddhists were convinced that the man changes permanently, being born again and again; exactly in the way we make cream from milk and butter from cream. Stanescu said that a person is what one can remember about himself.5 Who are we, in fact, who was that talking bloodstain, 6 as the same Stanescu said, thrown as a coat on the bed of helplessness? I am talking about our patient, who was he: he was what we could see or he was what he could remember about himself? The two persons, although a single one, alas! are so different… Yes, the man is what one can remember about his own persn, but at the same time he is what he strives for. Memories are more a poverty than a fortune, because they are exactly what it is not and never could be, they are what the man lost but at the same time they are what he has been saved from. The past, as a swarm of venomous wasps, ran away from his heart, and does not consume him any longer, 7 as a poet who eluded his past wrote. The only available and permanent fortune of a person is that he strives for. But it is terrible when the ideal becomes part of the past, as in the case of the romantic writers. Such a person is represented by what he has not; he is the dead who guards a cemetery of recollections, a cemetery that nobody visits any longer, because it exists only in the sad mind of its guardian. It is very easy to illustrate the above said words with the case of our patient. I noticed that when I say “The English Patient”, the most people say: yes, it is a psychological movie; it is very depressing. That is why I decided to write about it, an occupation apparently unfit to a monk. The reason is that I thought not even a single moment that this movie is depressive, it seemed to me that it is a familiar movie, a real movie, a movie about myself. It was then that I understood the precipice between the psychology of the monks and that of those who are not monks. That is why I did not miss the occasion to tell something about the inciting universe of the monks. So, I shall be able to explain the strange feeling a monk has after watching this movie. Saint Ignatie Brancianinov, a Russian hierarch and hermit of the last century, said that those who do not turn monks willingly, in the end would do it unwillingly forced by death and illness. The saint does not consider monasticism as an Orthodox ritual but he does it taking into consideration the depriving of the body pleasures, fortune and fame. As the English patient, the monk has no body pleasures. In this respect, they resemble each other. What separates them is their own attitude towards what is happening to them. The patient, although he is not able to, continues to wish; the monk, although everything is allowed to him 8, and is at hand, may not wish. The first suffers, the second enjoys. The first is crippled; the second is in good health. The first lives the beginning of the hell while the second lives the heaven. The greater was the pleasure, the sadder is the seclusion. That is why the person, who had a life full of sins, when he/she is old or sick, lives the suffering of leaving the sin more than the consolation that he/she got rid of it. The rough memory of pleasure could never replace the pleasure itself; on the contrary, by its intensity it produces a great suffering. The memories of the English patient (which normally must direct the watcher towards the pleasure) produce a painful feeling of discomfort and suffering. These memories dig like a curette in the open womb of our mind. Everybody else will live the suffering of this character, if not in illness, then into the sticky arms of a helpless old age where the gloved hand of death will fetch him or her from, as from a surgical tray and will throw them into the poll of hell. Hell is the place where the past is cowardly at war with the man. Hell is the place where memories, as the grubs in the movies with aliens, split and infinitely develop from our own body and soul, tearing us permanently like the eagles did with the skinned kidneys of Prometheus. Hell is the absolute and infinite eruption of our passions, which can no longer be satisfied. This is the description of hell made by Saint Gregory the Great in his Dialogueues about death. Passions, although of spiritual origin, can be satisfied only by means of the body. After death, when body changes its properties, its spiritual side will keep the properties and habits of its lifetime. When entering eternity, passions will progress infinitely, so that even the slightest irritation will become rage and a guilty look will become an ocean of lust. But the body will not be capable to fulfill its desires. Suffering will arise from the turmoil of all the passions rushed upon the helplessness of the body. The existence of the body is necessary, both the sinners and the righteous will recover their bodies. The saints (as Saint Gregory says) to enjoy the perfect harmony which they were created for; the sinners - to die permanently and forever in body and soul. 9 In this respect, man is what he can remember about himself; that is - he exists without being, only as a virtual reality within his own memory. The ancient Egyptians had the belief that a person lives as long as the memory about him/her lives, that is why they built those mausolea for their pharaohs. The unlimited nature in time and space of the human soul has the ability to live with an infinite intensity what really does not exist any longer. Suffering is the sum of all these existences that hang from our souls. That is why man must surpass them, breaking away from the swamp of his own memory and settling on the stone of a bright hill. This bright hill is the opposite of suffering; we come close to it as we move away from the reasons of our fear, this is the way from death to life (John, 5, 24), Christ told us about. The one who does not realize it remains a simple monster, which, in the end, death will take out from the dead womb of time. But the man is not only what he remembers about himself but also he is what he strives for. This ideal must be so high that it can never be surpassed by the past. As in the case of the English patient, the ideal of most people turns against them like a boomerang in the end. That is, except immortality and the state of grace, nothing can obtain an unlimited ascendance. Everything can be destroyed in a second by an exterior accident, provoking the humiliating regression towards the endless suffering. The things that before conferred him the impression of power and of prosperity, now they are fruits he is ashamed of (Romans, 6, 25). In order to underline the monstrosity of this shame, the director makes a young woman sit on the edge of the bed of this helpless person she takes care of, but a woman who passed her nights in the arms of a healthy man, the Muslim soldier who seemed to neglect her a little. The life of these persons is cruelly fenced in by the barbed wire of their bodies. That is why, that woman (attractive in the beginning due to her virtues, due to her self-sacrifice with which she assumes the destiny of this poor crippled man) lives a miserable underground life where she is but a poor whore mocked at by the sensual attraction towards a soldier not much interested in her. On the other side there is the lost image of the beauty and strength of her patient that, theoretically, challenges the image of the Muslim soldier. We are somehow suggested the failed love story between the patient and his nurse, because of his physical helplessness. All these create that those who are not monks call “a depressing environment”. There is still a detail that confers the character a trace of dignity, a reminiscence of the man who was and which stands for a certain manly delicacy. This is the scene when the patient finds a volume of Herodotus and asks her if she knows who Herodotus was. She answers that she does not know and he simply tells her that Herodotus was the father of history. This scene is very delicate as the non-arrogant superiority of the crippled slips before the healthiness and the beauty of the ignorant woman. Somehow this detail makes this monster seem fascinating, as in the case of the Beast of the famous fairy-tale. Suddenly, au aura of mystery and nobility appears around him, which may create a force of attraction. This is only an example how a person preoccupied by the spiritual facts keeps creating an interest around him, even in the case of his perfect physical helplessness. Neither the old age, nor the illness make him useless, on the contrary, they contribute to his embellishment. If a man was concerned only with the beauty of his body and all his charm was limited to it, he is useless when he is sick or old, whereas the man concerned with virtue grows more and more. This is the case of the old monks who surpass with their virtues any physical beauty of the young ones who lack experience. In front of their spiritual height, physical beauty looks like the cheap make-up of a peasant girl. Any kinds of illness or physical handicap adorn the virtuous man as war scars; in them, the rose of virtues lives as in a crystal vase. If a simple speech about Herodotus roused such an amount of sympathy towards the crippled patient, how impressive he could have been if, by his stories (like a new Scheherazade) he might have kept the woman near him so that she could not feel the need to leave him for that soldier. This is the most difficult exam of manhood: to stop a woman from sinning and at the same time to give her no hope that you ever could sin with her. It is not difficult to make a woman commit a sin as she is attracted by the virility of a man through her own weak nature but to prevent her from committing the sin only by words, so that she can stop even if she is attracted physically by you and overwhelmed by your philosophy to obey the sword of your word like a lamb – that is manhood which never fails. In this way a woman can be guided to immortality, offering her the most precious gift. This supreme step of manhood is reached at only by the saints, like Saints Vitalie, 10 avva John Colov 11 and Serapion .12 They showed us that this thing may happen and that each period of time has its own saints who strengthen this word, including our own epoch. These men continue to affect us even after their body has completely disappeared; thousands of women give up physical pleasure, preferring to discuss with them during their prayers. The English patient is our mirror and the fact that the movie director places him in an abandoned church it’s really extraordinary. This church is The Universe on its way to destruction within which we are living our agony. Like the English patient we are lying on the bed of helplessness waiting for the implacable death. It’s no use to shut the eyes in front of this wall towards which we hurry in a very great speed; no matter how, we shall crush on it and our pain will be awful. We were all in the body of Adam and now we suffer from that cosmic accident. Now, on the concrete table of time, struck by a complete amnesia, we whisper disparate fragments about some sort of happiness, love, and immortality. Christ bends over the bed of our suffering. He strikes us with the palm of love on our faces and talks to us: “My friend, it’s Me, do you remember Me?”; “ I don’t know what you are talking about, go away and don’t torment me any longer, let me die”, we answer to Him. The war is over. The nurse of our patient runs among the happy soldiers and finds her Muslim lover. Some soldiers take away from the church the litter with the Man and run happily with it under the rain that has just begun. What a good intention God had with this rain, as if He intended to wash him with the water of the Baptism after all the care He had towards him. The only person who was missing was the Orthodox priest to utter the life-creating formula: The slave of God (so-and-so) is baptized in the name of the Father, Amen. In the name of the Son, Amen. And of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

	free hosting image hosting hosting reseller online album e-shop famous people