The greater the temporal distance from the times of Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722-1794), the more majestic and attractive his figure appears. In Skovoroda’s theological and ethical doctrine and his poetic works scholars attempt to find the answers to many questions: How can we understand the world in order to make it better? What is happening to us? Where does real happiness lie?
One cannot help agreeing with Dmytro Chyzhevsky (1894-1977), one of the most authoritative researchers of Skovoroda’s body of writings, who noted that Skovoroda had long been the hub of Ukrainian spiritual history. Therefore, those who study his priceless literary heritage are constantly drawn back spellbound to this cryptic figure.
Many researchers describe Skovoroda in different ways: he is called an original thinker, non-systematic thinker, chaotic theoretician, preacher, interpreter of the Bible, materialist, atheist, religious skeptic, Freemason, etc. Skovoroda is often associated with various philosophical schools founded by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Fathers of the Church, Spinoza, and the German mystics Eckhart, Tauler, and Boehme. All these ideas and assumptions about the sources of Skovoroda’s theological teachings and his moral, ethical, and poetic works are eclectic and at times contradictory.
But despite the ongoing academic debates, one fact is indisputable: Skovoroda was one of the most ingenious thinkers and outstanding minds of 18th-century Eastern Europe and an exponent of the Ukrainian soul, embodying deep self-concentration, a sincere heart, broad nature, supremacy of spiritual values, a great love for nature, humanness, and religious spirit. These features were especially evident in Ukrainian society in the years that immediately preceded and ushered in the era of Skovoroda.
Skovoroda’s theological, enlightening, and educational activities clearly pivoted on the national idea, as he pursued the philosophical, polemical, and poetic traditions of the Kyivan school and upheld the idea of the Ukrainian people’s spiritual emancipation. This large layer of the national “grain” that grew abundantly in Skovoroda’s oeuvre has yet to be adequately explored and synthesized.
As a great thinker, poet, and educator, Skovoroda encountered people from all walks of life during his travels. He could not remain indifferent to what was going on in Ukraine and the state of Ukrainian society. Skovoroda was a witness to the forcible integration of Ukrainians into the Russian imperial space with all that this implies. As one who came from the free Cossack community that still remembered the recent glorious military exploits of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Skovoroda reacted painfully to the various kinds of oppression to which his people were being subjected, including spiritual oppression, which significantly increased in the early 18th century through the efforts of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Why did this happen? The Russian church finally lost its independence from secular government during the reign of Peter I (1672-1725), who forcibly subjugated the religious authorities by abolishing the patriarchate in 1721. To manage church affairs he instituted a state body, the Holy Synod, headed by an ober-procurator. For nearly 200 years Russian Orthodox clergymen were fact civil servants dressed in cassocks. They were also paid from the state’s coffers.
Any dissent was harshly suppressed by various tsarist bodies, including the Secret Chancellery, which was established in 1718 by Peter I as a kind of inquisition to combat free thinking. Its torture chambers also held some graduates of the Kyiv Academy, including the great intellectual Feofilakt Lopatynsky, Archbishop of Tver and Kashyno, who vociferously opposed the dark era of foreign dominance in Russia, known as bironovshchina. The Secret Chancellery and the Synod also instituted strict surveillance of Bishop Iosif Mitkevich of Bilhorod (?-1763), with whom Skovoroda maintained friendly relations, and other progressive people of the time.
Reflecting on the moral and psychological condition of the enslaved people, Skovoroda sears his contemporaries with true-to-life and painfully bitter conclusions about the situation in which Ukraine found itself in the final decades of the 18th century. “To rob one of courage and instill fear in him means to oppress, lock up, and bind up the soul so that it cannot be joyful, but will sorrow in a good cause. It is a very terrible outrage to corrupt a human in his thoughts and heart, as if in his seeds and roots,” he wrote.
Seeing the way his people were being enslaved by the Russian autocracy, Skovoroda extols the incomparable value of erstwhile liberties in the poem “De Libertate” (On Freedom), in which he praises the courage of Hetman Khmelnytsky, who led the struggle against the oppressors and laid the groundwork for Ukrainian statehood.
What is freedom?/ What is the use of it?/ Some say it is gold/ But if you really compare it with gold/ It is just a quagmire./ Oh, if only I did not turn into a fool!/ Glory eternal to you,/ The hero Bohdan, chosen by God!
Skovoroda felt he was a stranger in his society, which he tried to change by preaching Christian values, seeking to persuade people of the importance of science and knowledge. Only those who could challenge his high intellect understood him.
What infuriated Skovoroda the most was the fact that the majority of Russian Orthodox priests did not lead people to genuine spiritual purification but mainly focused their pastoral activities on formal attributes, such as hours-long church ceremonies and rites with elements of ostentatious theatricality. Skovoroda taught that these rituals could only be an impulse for an individual to seek the true path to perceiving God. In Skovoroda’s words, one can only arrive at a highly spiritual Christian life by fulfilling the commandments of Jesus Christ.
In his educational course of Christian ethics, The Primary Door to Christian Morality (1766), Skovoroda offers his own interpretation of the crucial concept of God and Divine Providence, shows what human happiness is, and explains the difference between piety and church ceremonies, passions and sins, love and candor.
Skovoroda emphasizes that candor is “a calm breath of the Holy Ghost in your heart.” Then he compares candor with a beautiful garden “full of quiet winds, sweetly- smelling flowers and serenity, in which flourishes the tree of life, which sends every wise man Supreme Reason (God).” After candor come “goodwill, kindness, good cheer, humility, non-hypocrisy,” charity, benevolence, satisfaction, optimism, and other inalienable joys. “Whosoever has this kind of soul carries the world and grace. There is eternal joy above the head of such a true Christian,” Skovoroda notes.
The leitmotif of this work is Skovoroda’s claim that an individual can fathom Divine Providence if he or she knows the inner, hidden, message of the Bible, and people will find themselves in the Kingdom of God on this earth only if they rid themselves of destructive inclinations, such as envy, foul language, rancor, false pride, “flattery, sadness, and other worms that are latent in the soul.”
In the conditions of colonial Ukraine, in 1787, the twilight of his life, Skovoroda wrote a profound moral, ethical, and educational work entitled The Wretched Skylark, in which he allegorically shows the way to salvation in the conditions of a social and spiritual yoke in which Ukrainian intellectuals found themselves.
In a dedication to his friend F. Dysky, Skovoroda wrote: “I am presenting you with my Wretched Skylark. He will sing for you even in winter, not in a cage but in your heart, and he will help you a little to escape the catcher and the wicked one, the evil one of this world. Oh Lord! How many meek lambs this wolf devours every day and night! Beware, my friend, of the danger you are in. The catcher does not sleep. You too should not sleep. An error is the mother of woe.”
Skovoroda cautions the young Ukrainian against being flattered by giving him the name of Tetervak (black grouse) that he uses in his book. “When you feel bad,” he writes, “just remember that we are all the same. For Great Russia calls all Little Russians ‘black grouses.’ It’s nothing to be ashamed of, because a black grouse is a stupid but friendly bird. It is not the one who does not know who is stupid (the one who knows everything has not been born) but the one who does not want to know.” Then Skovoroda advises him: “Hate stupidity: then, even if you are foolish, you will be among those blessed black grouses.”
Skovoroda’s term referred to those of his fellow countrymen who had succumbed to a philistine mentality and lived only according to the “philosophy of the stomach,” and thus lost their human traits and sense of patriotism.
In summing up some of these reflections on Skovoroda’s theological, moral, and ethical views that are expressed in his fundamental works of the late 18th century, I can firmly conclude that they were a response to Ukraine’s spiritual decline, when it had finally lost its political freedom, church, and educational system, and, in the words of Valerii Shevchuk, entered the ranks of “backward nations.” During the period of the complete destruction of national political institutions and their replacement with enslaving and alien institutions, Skovoroda maintained his ground in his teachings. He constructed his own theological, ethical, and educational system that was based on the Christian world outlook. He placed the individual in the center of this philosophy and showed him the true way to self- improvement and a highly-intellectual life.
