On God

Poem translated and analyzed: “God” by Gavriil Derzhavin

Highlighting the plight of translators across all genres, an old-fashioned and typically Gallic aphorism compares the fruits of their labor to women: when they are beautiful, they are not faithful, and when they are faithful, they are not beautiful. The challenges translators face are especially acute in poetry, where form imposes a straitjacket on those who undertake to smuggle verse across linguistic borders. The poet Joseph Brodsky, no stranger to the subject, once said that about eighty-five percent of the original text is preserved in translation — and that’s the best-case scenario. Undeterred, I have increased the extant number of renditions of “God,” a magnificent poem by the Russian poet Gavriil Derzhavin, by one. Competition has never hurt any translated text, and the reputation of beautiful women must surely be redeemed. As I chose — as much as possible — not to traffic in archaisms and took a few liberties here and there, the result is a woman of only modest faithfulness. As for beauty, I shall leave it to the eye of the beholder.

O You who has no bounds in space,
Who fills all matter with His being,
Eternal in the ebb of time, whose face
Is faceless yet whose Trinity’s all-seeing.
A spirit unitary and omnipresent,
A mystery to all — from king to peasant —
Who steers the world and seals its lot,
Who permeates life with His laws,
Of no fixed place, of no first cause,
You are the One whom we call God.

The wisest sage can strive to measure
The oceans’ depth and cosmic rays,
And count the planets at his pleasure,
But who can quantify Your grace?
The greatest minds of the world,
Born of Your dazzling light, O Lord,
Fail to explain Your sacred decrees;
A thought that dares to ape Your glory
Evanesces like some ancient story,
Turning before You into debris.

From the abyss of all eternity
You spawned the genesis of chaos,
Bestowed the seal of Your paternity
On the abyss itself and named it Deus.
The origin of all and of Yourself the maker,
You are of life the giver, arbiter, and taker.
Through You all objects course and flow;
You are the first word and the last,
The future, present, and the past,
The source of Your own wondrous glow.

You hold the chain that links all things,
Where the beginning meets the end;
You arm each life with fledgling wings,
By death another winged pair You lend.
Below You spread myriads of solar globes,
Dark declensions and sidereal slopes;
At Your feet shines a mute astral choir,
Resplendent like white garlands of snow
That on frosty days lie high and low,
Gleaming in pristine, wintry attire.

Luculent, life-giving cosmic bodies
Drift through an infinite expanse,
Obeying laws that man so vainly studies,
Your laws of which no mortal can make sense.
Those luminous celestial fireflies
And fire-emitting, blinding skies
Dissolve in Your relentless gaze;
Along with mountains of crystal caves
And mighty ranges of supernal naves,
They disappear like nights before bright days.

For You all surfaces are nothing
But tiny droplets in the sea;
The universe is but a farthing —
What, then, to say of worthless me?
This giant maelstrom of spheres,
So distant they appear in light-years —
If I can be so bold as to compare —
Are next to You a speck, a spot,
While I am just a lowly dot,
Who’s of his nothingness aware.

His nothingness! And yet through me You shine
Like beads reflecting beams of sunshine’s fire,
With a nobility majestic and divine
You fill me — and I Your godliness acquire.
My nothingness! And yet my life takes wing,
Unsated, thirsty. Into the empyrean I fling
Myself to look for You through cosmic mist,
And contemplate, and freely roam,
And think, and wonder in the gloam:
I am alive — and therefore, You exist.

For You exist! This is a fact of nature,
A fact my heart and mind corroborate,
A fact that is beyond all peradventure;
Nothingness cannot, then, be my fate.
Placed in the bosom of the universe,
A particle, an atom with its own force,
I’m in the omphalos of earthly essence;
A central link among Your creatures
That joins all spirits of divine features
With live beings of a clear naissance.

I am the link between all firmaments,
The ultimate hypostasis of all material,
The heart of life and all its elements,
The cradle of what is godly and ethereal.
My body wastes and turns to ashes,
My mind takes charge of lightning flashes;
I’m king and slave, both God and worm —
A miracle, in short! Yet though my lineage
Is as unclear as is the author’s image,
I couldn’t have authored my own form.

I am a creature of Your blueprint,
A workpiece of Your wise design,
A proof of Your life-giving footprint;
Your soul conditions that of mine.
Your truth presents a great demand:
That I the deathly chasm transcend,
And that my soul become immortal
And don the fusty garb of death,
So when I draw my final breath,
You will re-open your Edenic portal.

Inexplicable, inscrutable, sublime!
My imagination cannot trace,
Conjuring You in space and time,
The radiant shadow of Your face.
But as we owe You hymns and praise,
We must our mortal bodies raise
And seek You in a hidden latitude,
Casting our eyes upon the sky,
Praying for Your realm to draw nigh,
While spilling tears of gratitude.

Derzhavin (1743–1816) began working on the poem in 1780. When he finished it four years later, having been detained by affairs of state, the world was on the cusp of seismic shifts. The French Revolution was less than a decade away. The Industrial Revolution loomed on the horizon, threatening the physical landscape with smokestacks and railroads, and the social landscape with secularism, positivism, and, to use a term Foucault coined, biopolitics. Society was still mostly agrarian and the masses religious — enlightenment was very much a luxury item, the preserve of the upper echelons — but the Voltairean grimaces of the epoch had left their mark. Frederick the Great was so derisive of Christianity his Political Testaments were not released from the safe custody of the Hohenzollern archives until the 20th century. Chancellor Kaunitz was described by one historian as a “cynical and resolute foe of the church,” though of course “church” should not be conflated with religion. Closer to home — or rather, at home — the private life of German-born Catherine the Great suggested her brand of Orthodox Christianity was fairly relaxed. Alexander Pushkin, that daystar of Russian poetry, displayed indulgence (and his trademark humor) when he wrote, “The dainty old lady / lived pleasantly and with a touch of sin” (“Starushka milaya zhila / priyatno i nemnogo bludno”). Others were more censorious. Alexander Herzen referred to the empress as a “gray-haired harlot”; Tolstoy was equally irreverent. Citing contemporaries’ memoirs, Igor Volgin, a Russian historian and literary maven, has improved on the private life offered in the mainstream biographies of the empress by suggesting that her boudoir antics were also LGBT-friendly. It’s true that the palaces of Saint Petersburg were sui generis places, as was the charmingly idyllic Sanssouci of the Prussian culture vulture, and 18th-century monarchs were certainly not the first crop of rulers to maintain different sets of books to reconcile the very non-Christian requirements of day-to-day administration and realpolitik with demands of piety in the private chapel. But they seem to have been the first ones to cook the books — with unprecedented relish and much moral levity. And as one Russian expression has it, it is the head of the fish that starts to rot first.

This was the context in which Derzhavin wrote his poem “God.” But who was Derzhavin himself? Posterity knows him as a great poet; he was also a statesman. From the standpoint of the modern imagination, forged by romantic notions of starving artists forever at odds with the business of living, a poet with a full-time career in politics is a joke (much like Nietzsche’s married philosopher). But in tsarist Russia this was not uncommon. The 19th-century poets Vyazemsky and Tyutchev were also highly placed government officials; in fact, in post-Petrine Russia, male members of the nobility were expected to do military service in order to acquire a rank (chin), without which a nobleman was something of a misfit. Even a quick perusal of Derzhavin’s biography confirms he took his duties seriously. A low-ranked member of the elite Preobrazhensky Regiment during Catherine the Great’s coup d’état, Derzhavin participated in the suppression of the Pugachev Revolt in the 1770s and went on to make a spectacular career for himself. By the 1790s, he had penetrated the corridors of imperial power, serving as a private secretary to Catherine the Great and, some years later, as Russia’s minister of justice. All in all, this was very much a man of the Ancien Régime, with something of the rococo about him. The bewigged character serenely meeting our gaze from his portraits certainly evokes creaky lacquered parquet floors, glittering chandeliers, and the languid flutter of court dresses.

Did Derzhavin intimate the tectonic plates that were about to rub against each other? And did that rub off on “God”? We will never know for sure, but this poem of eleven stanzas is magnificent all the same. Magnificent not on account of its artistry — while its form is excellent, any Russian poet is condemned to be measured against Pushkin and other mandarins of Russia’s Golden Age of poetry, who can be neither outshined nor outdone. The magnificence lies in the poem’s extraordinary breadth and profundity, and its apparent simplicity only makes the poem more beguiling. The opening lines of “God” draw the reader in immediately. The first stanza introduces God as He appears in the Christian imagination (Derzhavin writes literally, “Faceless, yet with three divine faces”), but the Holy Trinity has a deeper meaning for Derzhavin. He noted elsewhere that the three hypostases are also metaphysical, symbolizing the infiniteness of space, the continuity of life in the movement of all elements, and the infiniteness of time, all merging together in God. The Holy Trinity is how we visualize God within the narrow bounds of our imperfect understanding; it is how we picture God and how we see Him. But the Gospel of John says no one has ever seen God. As with so many other things in the Bible, this is best taken metaphorically — “seeing” might be interpreted as “knowing.” No one has ever known God. This is what Derzhavin means when, towards the end of the stanza, he writes that no one has ever conceived of God (“Kogo nikto postich’ ne mog” — or, as I translated it, “A mystery to all — from king to peasant”). The image we have of Him may not at all correspond to what He looks like, a point that is made again in the last line. “You are the One whom we call God,” it reads, somewhat tentatively (“Kogo my nazyvaem: Bog”). It is as if God has other names; “God” is just the one we happen to use, the one that our imperfect language assigns to Him. We think we know God, but we don’t really know Him. This is a subject Derzhavin comes back to in the last stanza, and I will too.

Having reached an exceptionally high level of civilization, we tend to think of ourselves as omnipotent and all-knowing. The second stanza cautions us against complacency and arrogance. Derzhavin here anticipates positivism, which dismisses anything that cannot be measured, demonstrated, or proven. According to positivists, God cannot exist since he is not demonstrable. But neither are love and hope — do we stop believing in those? God may be illogical and inexplicable, but are we logical and explicable to ants as we go about our business? Can we even properly speak of logic in the case of ants? However sophisticated man might get, there is a dimension that will forever be beyond the reach of even the most learned minds. God is that dimension. Any thought that seeks to penetrate the mystery of God will hit a wall — or, as Derzhavin says beautifully, it will evanesce in the face of God’s majestic splendor.

The third and fourth stanzas are a lovely elucidation of Derzhavin’s cosmology. God is everything, and everything is God. He is eternity and light, space and time. God encompasses all the tenses: the past, the present, and the future. But He is also greater than the tenses. He joins the beginning with the end (“You hold the chain that links all things / Where the beginning meets the end”), but He Himself stands outside of both, transcending them. Do the universe and time have a beginning? What existed before that beginning? Is a state that predates time even fathomable? These eternal questions are one enormous mystery, and that enormous mystery is God. In the original text, Derzhavin credits God with having created everything with a single word. This too can be, and perhaps should be, understood metaphorically: God, the Gospel of John teaches us, is the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” God and the Word are synonymous, and God did not literally create everything by uttering a single word; He is the Word — of Himself the maker, the source of His own glow.

The fourth stanza also contains an implicit reference to one of the central tenets of Christian doctrine: the paradoxical idea of resurrection (paradoxical because it holds that death produces life). The original text reads: “And life with death [You] give” (“I smertiyu zhivot darish’”). Four simple words — but behind them, an entire philosophy towers over like the Himalayas: through His own death on the cross, Christ defeated death and bestowed upon mankind, upon each and every one of us, eternal life. When Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate Easter, they sing, “Hristos voskrese iz mertvyh, smertiyu smert’ poprav,” meaning, “Christ has risen from the dead, having defeated death through death.” Earthly life ends with death, but beyond that earthly death there is eternal life, with its promise of salvation and freedom from the tyranny of time.

The last several lines of the fourth stanza offer a hibernal and very picturesque comparison between the stars and snow that dusts the landscape on a clear frosty day — an apposite comparison for a denizen of a hyperborean region, something that Derzhavin himself acknowledged in his notes. But there is much more to the last line of the stanza — “Thus are the stars in the abyss beneath You” (“Tak zvezdy i v bezdnah pod Toboyu”) — than poetic elegance. The reader is invited to ponder the abode of God. For where is God? Christians have always believed that God inhabits the sky. With the development of science, the sky was sometimes used against them — Gagarin, the first man to have traveled to space, reportedly said he found no sign of God during his cosmic sojourn. But what is the sky? Instead of taking it literally to be that boundless dome of blue that we see above us, the sky can be conceived as a symbol of a life glorious and exalted, a life that is the antipode of our profane existence. It is a place where man does not debase or sully himself, a place of purity, innocence, and joy. But where is it? The great philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev believed that the sky, like God, was transcendental — the realm of the spirit and the incorporeal that will free us from the yoke of the physical world. The godly is in another dimension altogether, and perhaps this is what Beethoven had in mind when he wrote “Over the stars he must dwell” (“Über Sternen muß er wohnen”) in the “Ode to Joy.” Not in the stars, or among the stars, but over (or above) the stars, the very stars that, Derzhavin says, are in the abyss at God’s footstep. In Derzhavin’s cosmology, the universe can fit into the palm of God’s hand — the luculent celestial bodies drifting about, we read in the fifth stanza, dissolve before the divine grandeur of God. He is simply too distant. Yet Jesus taught the Kingdom of God is within us. And so it is — but it must also be beyond us, for if it were only within us, then paradise would merely entail a retreat into oneself. So close and yet so immeasurably far — this is not a contradiction or an inconsistency, but the very mystery of God that Derzhavin underscores when he points to His abode as being somewhere above the stars as well as within us (“You fill me — and I Your godliness acquire” — see the seventh stanza).

A criticism often levelled at Christianity is that it reduces people to slavery. In the eyes of the religion, this criticism maintains, man is nothing. It’s true that Christianity teaches humility and seeks submission in the face of God. But it does a lot more. When the Son of God became a mortal, God lowered Himself; by lowering Himself, He made man divine. Fashioned in the image of God and raised to divine status through a sacrifice on the part of God, man cannot be a slave. This beatific conception of man’s divinity is unique to the Christian faith and can be appreciated even by those who choose not to believe in Christian teachings. It is when man rejects his divine image and classifies himself as a biological form, a species, a kind of animal that has simply drawn the winning ticket in the evolutionary sweepstakes — it is then that man is reduced to nothingness, his life bereft of meaning and a higher purpose. It is to egoism that Christianity is inimical and not to individualism. As Alexander Schmemann, a highly learned Russian Orthodox priest, pointed out, Christ’s parable about the lost sheep clearly shows that the Christian faith is about the one lost sheep, about the individual and not the collective. For God, every person counts. Berdyaev wrote extensively about the emancipatory nature of Christianity, though Berdyaev understood freedom not in a legalistic or sociopolitical sense (of which the most extreme example, given and excoriated by Berdyaev, is of the decadent libertarian leave-me-alone variety), but in a spiritual one; Christianity frees man from the elements by making him nature’s master, and it also frees him from the shackles of the material world by offering him the emancipation inherent in the world of the spirit.

The sixth stanza seems to lend weight to the accusation that Christianity is about intoning one’s worthlessness before God. The cosmos is just a dot when compared to God; the author himself, like any mortal, is nothing. But the following stanza turns this on its head. “And yet through me You shine . . . You fill me — and I Your godliness acquire” (“No Ty vo mne siyaesh’ / Vo mne Sebya izobrazhaesh’”). Man reflects God’s glow; in man God represents Himself. This is a categorical refutation of the idea that Christianity degrades man; God cannot be mirrored in a slave, and the very idea would rightfully be considered sacrilegious. But there’s a further twist. While man might be nothing, the author continues, he has a soul that thinks, contemplates, and reflects (in my translation, I do not use the word “soul” at this juncture, for a reason that will be made clear shortly). As man possesses a soul, he exists, and therefore, so does God. The presence of the soul confirms the existence of the divine. This is an objection against those who, seeking to strip man’s origins of metaphysics, claim that intangible things associated with divine nature — for example, morality — are merely adaptive mechanisms. For an early human society to survive, it had to develop certain laws to prevent its members from killing each other; our existence is only proof of the success of these adaptive mechanisms. But this utilitarian approach, while persuasive, does not explain our yearning for beauty and our propensity for contemplation. The Divine Comedy, Giotto’s frescoes, Mozart, St. Mark’s Basilica — the notion that all that can be reduced to adaptive mechanisms can hardly be ventured into seriously. Masterpieces of art are the workings of the soul, and the soul is a mystery in need of metaphysics if it is to be rendered explicable. But, contrary to what Derzhavin writes, the soul does not think or reflect; it can only feel. The mental activities are performed by the mind. Man’s nous proves that man exists — and, therefore, so does God. We’re left with a delightful reformulation of the famous Cartesian dictum. I think, Descartes said, therefore I am; I think, Derzhavin says, therefore You are. The reserved, slightly haughty smile on the face of the bewigged gentleman looking at the spectator from those portraits seems to grow a tad more playful.

The next two stanzas further develop the theme of the centrality of man as well as of his divine nature. As mentioned, the seventh stanza proposes that the existence of man and his soul (mind) prove that God exists. The eighth stanza reinforces the idea that the existence of God raises man. Translated more or less literally, the fourth line reads: “You exist — and I therefore can’t be nothing.” In the ninth stanza, Derzhavin goes into overdrive with this idea. I must once again abandon my translation and resort to a literal one: “I am a tsar — I am a slave — I am a worm — I am God!” For a mortal to refer to himself as God is an act of considerable audacity, and I wonder if the line didn’t raise hackles among Derzhavin’s more pious contemporaries. Of course, this exclamatory assertion is not meant to be taken seriously. The point is that man is at once nothing and everything; he combines within him both his fallen state and God’s divine grace. Without God in the picture, he is a slave and a worm; when he lets God into his life, he is a tsar and even God.

It is noteworthy that “God” is preceded by the word “worm.” Not only are God and a worm inserted into the same line, they are also immediate neighbors. Perhaps Derzhavin simply thought it made for better flow; perhaps he didn’t think anything in particular. But artists of Derzhavin’s caliber are unlikely to think nothing in particular, certainly not when treating such sensitive topics. Derzhavin wouldn’t have risked flippancy here, even if it had been justified by better flow. There may be a different explanation for the juxtaposition. Years ago, I heard a high-profile Russian literary critic lambast Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel of magic realism, for its alleged vulgarity (“poshlust,” Nabokov would have said). The critic was especially riled by a scene in which the freshness of sturgeon is discussed in a Soviet eatery. A novel that throws together Jesus and (un)fresh sturgeon, the critic fulminated, is a vulgar novel. I’d enjoyed the novel but agreed with the charge. I would be less inclined to agree with it now, for that is how life often is: the high is situated next to the low, the refined next to the crude, the lofty next to the degraded, and yes, Jesus next to sturgeon of dubious freshness. Bulgakov got it right. According to the Gospels, Christ made it a point to never turn away from the lowly. All belongs to God and to His order, and that applies to worms as much as to anything else.

The ninth stanza also casts a light on man’s place in the universe as well as on his origins. Derzhavin’s view is extremely anthropocentric: man is at the heart of the cosmic nexus; it is through him that everything is linked. Man is “cherta nachal’na bozhestva” — literally, the starting point of divinity, or, as I have it, the cradle of what is godly. His divineness is a miracle, but the source of that miracle is a mystery. “Whence do I come from? — I know not.” The lineage is unclear, but one thing is certain: man could not have sprung into existence on his own, without someone’s help. This is fleshed out at the beginning of the next stanza, where Derzhavin identifies God as the architect of man. God is the creator of man and the “soul of my soul” — note that man is again fused with God and God with man. Derzhavin then returns to the question of man’s ultimate purpose. That purpose is his homecoming. Man is to cross over the abyss of death and transcend it, attain immortality, and return to the bosom of his Creator. The fusion will have then been fully accomplished.

We have now reached the final stanza. It is composed of two main themes; both are central to the poem. The first theme again raises the question of our epistemological limits in relation to God’s existence. Recall that back in the first stanza, Derzhavin says no one has ever known God. He doubles down on this here, as when he says that the mind cannot even trace the outline of God’s shadow. Once again, the reader is reminded that God is ultimately unknown. However He has chosen to manifest Himself — or whatever manifestation man conjures in order to imagine God — we should always be aware that God is beyond anything that we can envisage. Any effort to drag God down to our level of understanding will only reveal our own inadequacy. Perhaps that is one of the metaphors of the Tower of Babel: the failure of an undertaking to know what had to remain unknowable. But Derzhavin is not moralizing here. What he ends up doing, consciously or not, is encouraging healthy skepticism. Since our knowledge of God is incomplete, it cannot be apodictic. This is not a reason to doubt God — for Derzhavin, God’s existence is obvious — but we ought to be careful about being too dogmatic about what we believe in, for the truth is ultimately beyond our reach.

The stanza ends with this marvelous sentence: “While spilling tears of gratitude” (“i blagodarny slyozy lit’”). These tears of gratitude are not a poetic flourish. Derzhavin wrote that he was moved to end the four-year-long hiatus and finish “God” in 1784 after experiencing a vision of sorts — a bright light that had appeared to him in his sleep. That bright light brought tears to his eyes, and Derzhavin immediately leaped out of bed to complete the poem; the tears of gratitude with which he ends it are an acknowledgement of his divine afflatus. On the surface of it, then, there is nothing else to be added here. Yet this explanation alone seems unsatisfactory. When I first read the poem, I immediately thought of the Russian thinker Vasily Rozanov, who wrote in one of his works that Christianity is a lachrymose religion; a joyous Christian is a contradiction in terms. It is through tears that Christianity has transformed history; its central image is a crying face. Far from a way out of this vallis lacrimarum, Christianity is the vale of tears itself. Now, Rozanov had a complicated relationship with the Christian faith, even though his outlook was religious. As a thinker, he was controversial (sulfurous, some have said), and his religious views had a tendency to go through major permutations, so the man’s philosophy is best handled with care. Nevertheless, much of what he wrote about Christianity is penetrating, and melancholy is undeniably a considerable component of Christianity. But it is certainly not the only component, nor is it the dominant one. Schmemann, whom I’ve already mentioned, balked at the very thought. If Rozanov’s Christianity (at least at the time he aired his criticisms) was the religion of the Pietà, for Schmemann it was the religion of the Annunciation, Adoration, and Ascension. The New Testament radiates with bliss, and so do the holidays of Christmas and Easter. “Joy to the World, the Lord is come” — no one who has ever heard these words sung will think of Christianity as a dominion of sadness. Rozanov believed that the tears inherent in Christianity elude the Western churches; only Eastern Orthodoxy preserves the saturnine essence of Christianity. But the Orthodox prayer to the Virgin Mary (Ave Maria) begins with “Rejoice, O Mother of God,” and Christians rejoice along with the Virgin Mary. There is no trace of melancholy in Derzhavin’s “God,” which is a lot closer to Schmemann’s conception of Christianity than to Rozanov’s. So, Derzhavin’s divine inspiration aside, why are there tears?

In one of his disquisitions, Schmemann offered an interesting explanation of the concept of fear in Christian theology. Fear has a negative connotation — as in fear of God and his judgment. The negative connotation is the one everyone knows and so many reject. But there is also a positive connotation. It is the fear that we experience when we are exposed to the beauty of God, which forces us to confront the ugliness of our earthly life, this — yes — vale of tears, with its petty preoccupations and futile struggles. Schmemann was talking in the context of religion, but the idea of positive fear can be expanded. Anyone who has learned to appreciate Bach’s Goldberg Variations or a Scriabin sonata will know the feeling — a feeling of joy and boundless admiration alloyed with the realization of the ugliness that cakes and mars our quotidian existence, of the inferiority of our ordinariness. Not for nothing did Berdyaev write — with a hint of misanthropy out of character for him — that Beethoven hadn’t created his masterpieces so that the European bourgeoisie could, for some twenty francs a ticket, drop by the heavenly realm, only to return to their base, earthly concerns a few hours later. Incidentally, Berdyaev believed that creative outbursts of artistic genius, meeting no recognition here on earth, flow away towards the “Kingdom of God” — real beauty is always godly. This experience of beauty leads to a surfeit of emotions: the awareness of perfection, the (positive) fear of our inferiority, and the gratitude to the source of this overwhelming beauty that must find expression. These are the tears of gratitude that are spilled in the last line of the last stanza of Derzhavin’s exquisite poem.

“God” appears in an anthology of Russian biblical poems that I happen to own. The anthology runs a gamut from barely intelligible 17th-century poems in Old Church Slavonic all the way to works by Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Zabolotsky. It wasn’t until after multiple re-readings of Derzhavin’s poem that it dawned on me what makes “God” so special. Unlike most of the other poems in the anthology, which use New Testament episodes for inspiration, “God” contains no references to the Gospels. Not once does Derzhavin mention the Virgin Mary, Bethlehem, or even Christ. In fact, the Holy Trinity and several relatively noncommittal allusions to Christian doctrine notwithstanding, there is little about “God” that is overtly Christian. It is as if the author is unconcerned with the exact method of religious conveyance, only with the final destination. Written at a time when Christianity was threatened by the Enlightenment, “God” is, paradoxically speaking, an enlightened ode to religion, revealing the latitudinarian overtones of Derzhavin’s Christian theism. This is less a biblical poem or even an ode (as it is often called) than a deeply intense, deeply personal dialogue with God. In the final analysis, “God” is less a profession of Derzhavin’s Christian faith than of his faith tout court, and that is one of the most spellbinding aspects of this work, written by a bewigged Russian statesman in the twilight of the pre-industrial age. Presented with this display of beauty and sagacity, the reader can only shed his own tears of gratitude.