Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799 - 1837)
PROPHET

(Literal translation from the original Russian by Dimitri Obolensky.)

Tormented by spiritual thirst
I dragged myself through a somber desert.
And a six-winged seraph
appeared to me at the crossing of the ways.
He touched my eyes
with fingers light as a dream:
and my prophetic eyes opened like those of a frightened eagle.
He touched my ears
and they were filled with noise and ringing:
and I heard the shuddering of the heavens,
and the flight of the angels in the heights,
and the movement of the beasts of the sea under the waters,
and the sound of the vine growing in the valley.
He bent down to my mouth
and tore out my tongue,
sinful, deceitful, and given to idle talk;
and with his right hand steeped in blood
he inserted the forked tongue of a wise serpent
into my benumbed mouth.
He clove my breast with a sword,
and plucked out my quivering heart,
and thrust a coal of live fire
into my gaping breast.
Like a corpse I lay in the desert.
And the voice of God called out to me:
"Arise, O prophet, see and hear,
be filled with My will,
go forth over land and sea,
and set the hearts of men on fire with your Word."

Commentary by Vladislav Rozentuller

Our consideration of the poem will not be a philological or literary analysis. We will follow the psychological state, or consciousness, of the poet as expressed in the poem. Because we're dealing with a translation, we won't have access to the original words, or their sound and rhythm, and therefore our approach will mostly be through images. It is through the words we do have, and the images they convey, that we will try to recreate the poet's inner state and the radical changes it goes through between the beginning and end of the poem.

Pushkin describes in this poem the making of a prophet. How does a human being become worthy of divine inspiration, a divine calling? It may be, as some have claimed, that Pushkin had specifically in mind the archetype of the poet and the poet's prophetic gift. But in any case we will see that his description carries universal force. It shows the natural man on his way to becoming a man of spirit. Pushkin is concerned here, not only with inspiration in the artistic sense, but with the deepest principles of spiritual transformation.

The entire description is set down in the first person, past tense, by someone who has already become a prophet and is now giving witness to the steps in his spiritual journey. The poem begins:

Tormented by spiritual thirst
I dragged myself through a somber desert.

If we ask what is required to start out on the prophet's path, the answer sounds clearly and unambiguously in the first words: "Tormented by spiritual thirst...." Thirst that reaches a tormenting intensity is no casual thing. Our thirst for water expresses a need for something essential, and when this thirst becomes extraordinarily intense, we feel our life threatened. Similarly, the soul's journey toward its own higher life begins when it feels that without the spirit its life will come to an end.

It's easily forgotten today, when there are "seven easy steps" to almost everything, that one doesn't just decide out of curiosity or intellectual interest to "become spiritual," and then begin to do spiritual exercises, read spiritual literature, practice spiritual disciplines, and so on, as valuable as these steps may be in themselves. No, it is only when the absence of the spirit and our desire for it pains us strongly enough to be a mortal torment that we truly set out upon a path toward higher worlds. Our thirst can be compared to the profound love and longing that one being feels toward another person, especially toward a higher being. It's a longing for reunion, a passionate desire to find again what belongs most intimately to the soul but has been lost, and without which life does not seem worth living. Nothing less than this can compel us, at the end of our strength, to drag ourselves through a desolate landscape.

Some hermits and monks, fleeing the world of the senses and the temptations of human culture, have gone to live in the desert. It was not that they hated the familiar world, but that they desired the spiritual world more. They wanted to silence their senses and become open to higher things. This, however, does not quite seem to fit the current case. The hermit's desert does not have to be somber. There are sunrises and sunsets, oases -- and the "barrenness" itself can be beautiful. It's unlikely that those who want to abandon their former life and make the desert their home would call it "dark." And hermits do not drag themselves through the desert. They seek only silence and a certain disciplined regulation of their lives, as in a monastery. For the poet, by contrast, life itself has become the somber desert. This is why he can only drag himself along, summoning his last remaining strength in the hope of discovering what can satisfy his thirst.

When we lose a person we love and with whom we are deeply connected, our energy disappears and life ceases to hold interest for us. It no longer speaks in its former language. In this meaningless void we experience the emptiness of the desert. Something like this, though on a different level, happens with the spiritual seeker. The poet's former life is dying, but the new has not yet appeared. He is in a desert-like place of lifelessness, a place of contraction and death. His former joys have turned barren, provoking a burning thirst for another world. The senses, the body, the world of nature -- these can no longer provide their old satisfactions. There remains only suffering and pain -- the symptoms of dying. And so, having withdrawn from the world of the senses, he lives in a state between -- between the world of the senses and the world of spirit -- which is the state where all transformation occurs.

In such a situation we face three possibilities. We can try to escape the pain and regain normalcy, a choice that almost the entire world of commerce and entertainment and popular culture eagerly offers us. Or we can become trapped in our pain, consumed by it, suffering ever more intensely without solution. Or, in the third place, we can die and be transformed. And it often happens that only when we struggle with the pain to the very end of our resources, only when we have drained the last ounce of our own energy, does something new descend to meet us from a higher place.

And a six-winged seraph
appeared to me at the crossing of the ways.

A crossing of multiple ways in the desert is hardly something we normally expect, which reminds us that the poet's desert is above all an inner landscape. And within this landscape a crossroads speaks of the possibility to go in many directions, in absolutely opposite directions. We don't know which way to turn. So the crossroads only emphasizes our lostness. Our natural powers -- our senses, our rational understanding -- can no longer help us. We have come to the place of our own impotence, to the threshold. It's a place where choosing the right direction counts for everything, but our ability to make the choice has vanished. All we can do is to drop everything and just let it be. "Not my will, but Thine." A higher being can appear only in the space left empty by the disappearance of our own will.

Such, then, is the crucial moment when the seraph appears. In the next twenty lines we read of the transformation brought about by the encounter with this being who comes on wings from a different world, into the desert. What we saw till now was the poet's own striving -- all the way to the point of exhaustion. At precisely this point the seraph appears, and now it is this heavenly being who will be active, while the poet remains in a purely receptive state. Not that the poet does not suffer; some of what he goes through is obviously painful in the extreme. But his role is to endure -- to accept the pain and let himself be worked on. His own activity is replaced by that of a spiritual being. Learning this passivity and receptivity is always our need with respect to the spiritual world -- which should not be mistaken for passivity in our normal worldly affairs.

To begin with, the seraph enlightens and awakens the organs of perception.

He touched my eyes
with fingers light as a dream:
and my prophetic eyes were opened
like those of a frightened eagle.

The activity here is extraordinarily gentle. The ministering fingers only touch; they do not grasp. The Russian word for "finger" here is an ancient, noble, poetic word used, for example, of the fingers of a woman one loves. It points beyond the mere physical fingers. And this subtlety is reinforced by the words, "light as a dream." Imagine the series: light as a flower; light as a butterfly; light as air; light as a dream. By the time we reach the last, we have escaped the bounds of materiality altogether. The touching here is the pure inner activity of touching, without the outer weight, a touching like that of soul to soul.

But this ever-so-delicate touching yields strikingly dramatic results. We are asked to imagine the fierce, penetrating, sharply focused gaze of that most powerful, far-seeing bird, the eagle -- and not only an eagle, but a mother eagle or she-eagle (as the Russian has it) suddenly shocked into startled concentration, perhaps in defense of her young. Eagles possess far greater powers of sight than the human being. But here we are not looking at the outside. "Prophetic" eyes are distinguished, not by their physical acuity, but by their ability to descry hidden mysteries.

The gentleness, the seraph's lightness of touch, is directly related to the sudden, forceful effect upon the wakening powers of perception. For it is precisely when we enter that softer, subtler, inner world of seeing, a world where we are no longer outside the things we observe but rather participate in their essential being -- it is only then that we find every outer event touching us in some way, touching us more deeply, with a heightened sense of reality, and with a mother eagle's intensified concern. Indifference becomes impossible, because this opening of the eyes is in reality the opening of the soul.

The next activity of the seraph continues the purification of the senses, but because of the contrast between hearing and seeing it penetrates further, taking us even more intimately into connection with the essential reality of the world:

He touched my ears
and they were filled with noise and ringing:
and I heard the shuddering of the heavens,
and the flight of the angels in the heights,
and the movement of the beasts of the sea under the waters,
and the sound of the vine growing in the valley.

We can close our eyes at will, shutting out the visual world. But we cannot close our ears; the audible world penetrates us whether we like it or not. When the poet's ears are opened to the supersensible world, they are "filled with noise and ringing." On our path toward higher perception, we are not given the option to sit separately, apart, quietly and without participation. The world enters into us with a new fullness and insistence. It is always present.

And what did the poet hear? It is beautiful to read aloud, even in this unpoetic, literal translation, the sequence of revelations brought through the opened ears. In the sky above, on earth, and even beneath the waters the poet hears many things, both visible and invisible. Remarkably, he perceives each thing -- sky, angels, vine, beasts -- not with his eyes, and not even with his prophetic eyes, but with his ears. What he hears is their movement: shuddering, flying, growing. He does not perceive a fixed and completed image, but the inner gesture of things, the sounding soul itself. In the silence of the desert the world begins to resound with countless melodies through which beings and events reveal their essence.

The poem began with an expression of pained longing for the spiritual world, and now we have witnessed two steps on the way into that world. Much more remains.

He bent down to my mouth
and tore out my tongue,
sinful, deceitful, and given to idle talk;
and with his right hand steeped in blood
he inserted the forked tongue of a wise serpent
into my benumbed mouth.

The seraph's surgery now goes deeper, becomes more violent. He bends down, tears out, inserts. Where before there was a light touching in order to open up new powers of perception, now something is forcibly removed from the prostrate poet. The tongue gives expression to our inner being, to our soul. It has to do, not with the perceptions made available to the soul, but with the activity of the soul itself, which must be purified.

In its description of the misuse of the tongue -- misuse of the holy gift of speech -- the text mentions two different potentials of egotism. One is the tendency toward idle talk: our words have no meaning; they do not reach through to reality, but slide glibly and superficially over its surface. Too often, in such situations, we speak only to feel ourselves and in this way to remind ourselves that we exist. (We can all easily observe how much of our own conversation has this character.) At the other pole we find speech that is indeed meaningful -- because it is carefully calculated to serve our own purposes. Such speech is deceitful, cunning, with ulterior motives. If idle talk is vacuous, going nowhere, deceitful talk is all too intent on getting to some particular place. But in both cases only the needs of the ego are served.

The seraph tears out the sinful tongue, leaving the poet's mouth benumbed or paralyzed; the soul's egotism is silenced. Nothing can any longer be said that concerns only his own life. In place of his former organ of speech he receives the forked tongue of a wise serpent. The word translated "forked tongue" means literally "sting" or "sharp point" -- this is not a tongue for superficial talk! It bites and penetrates, reaching through to reality -- and therefore to wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of the world in its unity and wholeness, which the ancients expressed in the symbol of the snake biting its tail. Such wisdom can be poisonous or even deadly for the lower, egotistic nature -- for everything in us that aims for its own separate life. Speech embodying this wisdom becomes a reality-shattering and creative event in the world.

With his new tongue the poet, who previously was given the gift of perceiving the soul of the world, can now communicate to the world the depths of his own soul. But the operation goes deeper still, becoming even more violent as the actions become more penetrating:

He clove my breast with a sword,
and plucked out my quivering heart,
and thrust a coal of live fire
into my gaping breast.

Compare the earlier sequence, "bent down - tore out - inserted," with the new one: "clove - plucked out - thrust". Now we move from soul life to the very center -- the heart -- of human existence. With the cleaving stroke of a sword, the heart of the poet's natural existence is lifted out of his breast. The heart is quivering -- the Russian word can mean "anxious" or "timid." If idle or deceitful talk is a sin of the egotistic soul, fear is a sin of the will, a sin against life itself. We have fear in our heart when we don't trust life, when we lack faith in God's will. It's a sin against the divine foundation of our existence.

Fear makes us shrink back, contract toward ourselves. It has a cold quality. What the seraph puts into the breast of the poet is the opposite of this: a burning coal, with its expansive warmth and flame. It is the individual's share in the burning, enveloping, sacrificial fire at the heart of the universe, the fire that both creates and sustains the world.

And so, the seraph has successively addressed three levels of need, reflecting three aspects of human imperfection. The failure of our perceiving senses is that they are blind or asleep; they are lazy or indifferent to the world. The failure of the soul lies in its thoughtlessness and its calculation. The failure at the deepest root of our life is fear, or lack of trust in the divine will.

The transformation of the thirsting, suffering seeker of the spirit is now finished. He has endured to the end. But there is one final stage of the drama.

Like a corpse I lay in the desert.
And the voice of God called out to me:
"Arise, O prophet, see and hear,
be filled with My will,
go forth over land and sea,
and set the hearts of men on fire with your Word."

The path of spiritual transformation has brought the poet to this state: he lies in the desert "like a corpse." He is not dead, but only as if dead. The painful operations of the seraph were not merely processes of destruction awaiting some future healing. Rather, they were a destruction and healing, death and transfiguration. The poet's natural perception (eyes and ears), his feelings (tongue), and his will (quivering heart) were taken from him and replaced with a different spiritual constitution (inner perception, wise feeling, and a flaming will). Everything happened in the desert, which is to say: outside the normal world of the senses and within a realm of compelling spiritual thirst. The entire surgery was a surgery of spirit, and the poet himself, his "I," received it, enduring to the end.

The last step consists in the seeker's "I" learning to live in the world with the transformed constitution, just as he previously lived with his natural constitution. Spiritual seeking consists not only in dying to the world (first half of the path), but also in living a life of spirit so as to change the world itself. The seeker must be born again, not from nature, but from the Word of God ("and the voice of God called out to me"). He must find his way back from the desert into the world, because spiritual birth means at the same time acceptance of a mission.

In the uplifting gesture of the word "Arise" we can feel how the "I" enters again into the renewed vessel of its earthly life, just as a child stands upright at a certain age when its "I" takes hold of its natural body. The following lines of the poem sound a moral imperative -- the mission and destiny of the prophet: to take what was granted him in the spirit and freely realize it in the world. He must perceive the world in its depths ("see and hear") rather than externally and superficially, and he must carry his life as a gift and service for others, not as his own possession ("be filled with My will"). By speaking the divine word to others, he will awaken in them the spirit-longing, the burning longing of the heart, that first brought him into the desert. And so they will be led on their own way of spiritual transformation, independent of tribe and nation, and the fire of spiritual striving will not be extinguished on the earth.

go forth over land and sea,
and set the hearts of men on fire with your Word.

The poet has described a path leading from an initial longing for the spirit all the way to mature acceptance of a mission. The path led from society to the loneliness and desolation of the desert, through personal transformation, and then back to society. Having accomplished this path, a man becomes a prophet.