Giving thanks today

There is good reason to be thankful, first of all, that a holiday exists in American public life upon which gratitude—not merely a sentiment, but a virtue indeed—can still be, and is expected to be, expressed. Gratitude, which presupposes contentment with the good things one has, and which excludes by its nature expressions of covetousness and of entitlement, is a virtue completely alien to the ideology and the ethos of hyper-capitalism and hyper-individualism which suffuses the vestiges of the American public sphere. If this isn’t good reason to be thankful that Thanksgiving still exists, I quite frankly don’t know what is.

I am grateful, firstly, to God for His manifold blessings, for His creation, for His tireless labour through which creation exists, for His Sabbath rest (undertaken not out of His need but out of ours). I am grateful that God precedes us all and yet still loves us; I am grateful that God chose that we should exist, rather than that we should not. I am grateful to our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, for whatever hope I have left in me. I am grateful to my parents, without whose love and support I would not be here, sustained me when I was hospitalised and still sustain me now. I am grateful to my ancestors of whatever country they come—English, Welsh, German, Jewish, Illyrian and Scythian.

One reason why this Thanksgiving is special, is because my parents-in-law have arrived here from China for an extended visit. Their arrival is timely and deeply appreciated. Because I am their son-in-law and they are my parents-in-law, it’s to be expected that we don’t see eye-to-eye 100% of the time. However, I can already tell that my wife is happier because they’re here. I can already tell that my children are happier because they’re here. And they are already making our home a more complete one while they are present. My parents-in-law have been an inestimable help to my wife and me, in getting us physically and financially established in our living situation here in the Twin Cities metro area, and in assisting us with various aspects of our life here together. I am and will continue to be grateful to them for as long as they live and as long as I live.

This reflection on the Chinese side of my extended family, prompts me to undertake an examination of my own weak spot for the Arab cause. The root of the matter is this: my family would not be here with me in the United States, if it were not for the sustained Herculean efforts of the Arab-American community in Pawtucket, Rhode Island prevailing against the legal inertia of the DHS and immigration services. In particular, I want to give thanks for Fr Elie (Estephan) of St Mary Antiochian Church, whose own efforts in helping Syrian and Lebanese refugees find support and shelter here from war and deprivation at home, equipped him to address my own (much less dire) family situation.

In 2015 and 2016, Fr Elie assisted me with a list of contacts and advisers as well as his own introductions and good words, including with Ms Susan Saliba (an immigration attorney in Massachusetts) and Mr Albert Mokhiber (an immigration lawyer in DC), who afterward assisted me pro bono with completing the paperwork and navigating the ‘grey areas’ necessary for my wife and kids to join me here legally and in a timely way. For this reason, ever since that time I have always felt a need to pay it forward. Those same war refugees, who are the main beneficiaries of this legal and financial and physical assistance, and in much greater need than I am, I have come to see in a very real sense as my own family by virtue of our common situation. This is what underlies, to a significant degree, my sympathy and support for the cause of Syrian peace, and for the cause of Palestinian peace.

I am grateful to St Alexander Nevsky Church in Saimasai, Kazakhstan, for introducing me to the Orthodox Christian faith. I am grateful to Fr Sergey (Voronin), one-time rector of Holy Dormition Church in Beijing, China, for educating me and guiding me gently into that faith, and chrismating me. I am grateful to St Herman’s Orthodox Church, and to all of my friends and fellow-parishioners there, for continuing to assist in my salvation. I am grateful to them for putting up with my eccentricities, and for encouraging me to continue learning the Russian language.

I am grateful to the school I teach at, and to the Saint Paul Federation of Educators for being a source of community belonging and a source of strength for me. (Pray that we get a just contract!) I am also grateful to the students I teach—even the ones who misbehave occasionally!—Hmong, Karen and Vietnamese; White and African-American; Ojibwe and Hispanic. I learn as much from them as they learn from me, and I hope that in my classroom at least, they get as many chances as they can to explore how much they have to offer, and to exercise the reserves of strength and wisdom they possess.

And I am grateful indeed to the Ojibwe and Dakota nations whose guest on this earth I am. I am grateful that the Ojibwe and the Dakota are still here and still speaking and still active, and that they continue to bear witness to the sacredness of things like clean drinking water and healthy land. (And if this sentiment is somewhat subversive of the civic mythology of Thanksgiving: so much the better! I was always a bit of a Mary Dyer at heart; that’s something I come by honestly, and am also grateful for.)

To all I wish a Thanksgiving filled with love and gratitude: for the good things that we have been given, and for the one Good One that is given us to expect at the end of the season, through the prayers and labours and faith of our Lady, the Most Holy and Most Pure Birthgiver of God and Ever-Virgin Mary.

‘Deadly sins’ of left and right

Two articles that came out earlier today in American Compass that are deliberately paired off with each other, one on either side of the political divide, attempt to explore the ‘deadly sins’ of the left and the right. The first article, written by Ruy Teixeira, purports to explore the five deadly sins of the American left: idpol, retro-socialism, catastrophism, growth-phobia and techno-pessimism. And the second article, written by Henry Olson, explores the three deadly sins of the American right: market fundamentalism, snobbery and hubris. Both of these articles are well-intentioned attempts at introspection and self-examination of certain political mythologies and forms of inertia that have accumulated largely through the ‘bubble’ effect; and I appreciate them both for attempting to concentrate and explore the blindnesses, weaknesses and self-indulgences inherent in the political lifeworlds that most Americans now inhabit.

However, I would – to extend the metaphor slightly – like to play devil’s advocate to each. When it comes to discussions of ‘sin’ what we are really discussing is a moral anthropology and the relationship of man to the divine, and as such these questions are fundamentally religious in character. I would therefore like to think I am approaching these from a point of view that is faithfully Orthodox Christian in accordance with what is to date still the most trenchant and insightful document articulating the political and social values of the Church, though ultimately I must leave that to my confessor and to the hierarchs of my Church to judge.

Regarding the first article, by Teixeira. I agree with some of its central tenets. Firstly, I agree with Mr Teixeira that the American left suffers intensely from its fixation on identity politics, which despite the rhetoric of ‘intersectionality’ actually only serve to fracture the body politic into various grievance groups, and cast all social problems through a lens of oppression. I also agree that the left has allowed itself to be coopted by an elite politics which hides, underneath a ‘green’ veneer, a thoroughly nasty and anti-human Malthusian streak (of which I’ve been consistently critical these past eight years), and which tends to see poor people as a dead-weight problem rather than equal agents and partners in the political process. Insofar as he shares these points with the ‘realist left’, I tend to agree with him.

However, I would push back on a couple of the assumptions Mr Teixeira makes here. There is one really big one that he gets wrong, and that is the assumption that more is always better.

I am not convinced, frankly, that people actually always do want more. Based on the data, I’m fairly sure that’s not actually the case. The data consistently show, in fact (the linked CNBC story being only one example in a genre of œconomic studies that has been going on since the early 2010s), that up to a certain point, more material abundance does correlate with human happiness and satisfaction. Actually, that point is right around the average purchasing power parity in most modern Western developed nations, $75,000. However, past that point, having more material wealth doesn't actually make us happier even though we don’t stop trying to accumulate it. It’s the law of diminishing returns. With apologies to Daft Punk, there comes a point where harder better faster stronger just doesn’t get people off, and mo’ stuff actually begins to correlate with mo’ worries.

The irony is not lost on me that Teixeira is using the language of ‘sin’ here, because he is ignoring a critical dimension of the left’s failure to engage. The techno-enthusiasts and the growth-philes ignore these studies and these bodies of data at their own peril, because they are prescribing the wrong medicine – that of more material prosperity – for what is ultimately a hunger of the spirit. Saint John of Patmos put it correctly in his first Epistle: the problem with the ‘lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life’ is that it the stuff of the world that these desires want to find satiety in, is all ‘passing away, along with its desires’. Even though we cannot do without the material – Christ never condemned the material; He came in a material Body and by that Body gave us a material means of salvation – we look for more happiness in more material in vain. And we literally name as deadly passions – as sins – the sorts of behaviour Teixeira wants to encourage: lust, gluttony, avarice. Here is what the Russian Orthodox Church says about this:

The Church is not someone who defines the rights to property. However, the material side of human life is not outside her field of vision. While calling to seek first «the kingdom of God and his righteousness», the Church does not forget about people’s the need for «daily bread» and believes that every one should have resources sufficient for life in dignity. At the same time, the Church warns against the extreme attraction to wealth, denouncing those who are carried away by «cares and riches and pleasures of this life». The Church in her attitude to property does not ignore the material needs, nor does she praise the opposite extreme, the aspiration for wealth as the ultimate goal and value of life.

And still more emphatically:

Wealth cannot make man happy. The Lord Jesus Christ warns: «Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth». The pursuit of wealth makes a baneful impact on the spiritual condition of a person and can lead him to complete degradation. St. Paul points out that «they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things».

And again, with regard to the human impact on œcology, here is what the Russian Church has to say. Note the relationship between material desire, technological progress, and spiritual loss:

Relationships between anthropology and ecology are revealed with utter clarity in our days when the world is experiencing two concurrent crises: spiritual and ecological. In contemporary society, man often loses the awareness of life as a gift of God and sometimes the very meaning of life, reducing it sometimes to the physical being alone. With this attitude to life, nature around him is no longer perceived as home and all the more so as temple, becoming only a «habitat». The spiritually degrading personality leads nature to degradation as well, for it is unable to make a transforming impact on the world. The colossal technological resources cannot help humanity blinded by sin, for, being indifferent to the meaning, mystery and wonder of life, they cannot be really beneficial and sometimes become even detrimental. In a spiritually disorientated man, the technological power would beget utopic reliance on the boundless resources of the human mind and the power of progress.

One of the first unambiguously-left politicians to have foreseen the problem of too much prosperity, and how this prosperity should be dealt with and distributed, was General Secretary Hu Jintao, when he made a suspiciously Confucian (specifically, the Odes) call for a xiaokang shehui 小康社会, or a ‘moderately prosperous society’. It’s been a practical goal of the Chinese left since 2002 to aim for a society where a certain basic standard of living is met but not exceeded; and Xi Jinping has included this aim specifically in his ‘Four Comprehensives’ policy. Note that Chinese policy has not been anti-growth per se, and certainly not anti-technology per se. But according to their own internal documents they are still only willing to pursue growth up to a certain point and are committed to a goal of ultimately tapering off.

So here is where I would say that Teixeira needs to reevaluate. He accuses the left of something like ingratitude when he comes to the topic of technology. I think that’s fair. The left does need to evince a certain degree of gratitude for the frontiers in medicine, sanitation, infrastructure, communications and so on that have been pushed by technological innovation. But the attitude of ‘I want more’ runs thoroughly counter to this position of gratitude. Indeed, what happens when the ‘more’ that people want is inevitably unable to be satisfied by greater material wealth? If ‘more is better’, and ‘more’ even beyond the point of satiety – or even to the point of satiety – is all that the left really wants, then Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were completely right to reject it. And American voters will be right to reject it.

~~~

Coming to the second article, on the sins of American right, by Henry Olson… this article strikes me as a trifle strange on account of its fixation on the figure of Reagan. More on that later, though. The fact that Olson is straight-up willing to criticise these streaks in the Republican Party – not just the market fundamentalism but also white Protestant snobbery and the tendency to idolise the businessman and the pious patriarch – is truly laudable. What’s more, I don’t really dispute Olson’s diagnoses, though it must be admitted that I approach this topic more from a grounding in the American left than in the American right, and thus have a predisposition to affirm these critiques. Even so, there is a certain Whiggish anthropological falsity even under these needed and praiseworthy correctives, that needs to be addressed – and so I feel I have to play Devil’s advocate here as well.

Market fundamentalism is indeed a sin, and it is indeed a sin of the Republican Party in general going back to the 1980s. (It’s an intriguing bit of sleight-of-hand Olson uses to elide the fact that Reagan himself did much to foment and popularise within the Republican Party at least the first of these three cardinal partizan sins he discusses, despite a couple of protectionist flourishes Reagan made in his second term.) The Russian people know about market fundamentalism, having had a direct experience with the ‘shock doctrine’ between 1992 and 1998. So it should come as no surprise that the Orthodox Church likewise censures, first, the absolute commitment to private property among people:

According to the teaching of the Church, people receive all the earthly blessings from God who is the One who holds the absolute right to possess them. The Saviour repeatedly points to the relative nature of the right to property in His parables on a vineyard let out to be used, on talents distributed among many and on an estate handed over for temporary management. Expressing the idea inherent to the Church that God is the absolute owner of everything, St. Basil the Great asks: «Tell me, what do you have that is yours? Where from did you take it and bring to life?» The sinful attitude to property manifested in the conscious rejection of this spiritual principle generates division and alienation among people.

And second, that the Russian Orthodox Church condemns the idea that ‘market relations’ should be the sole or even primary consideration in the distribution of goods like healthcare:

Without giving preference to any organisational model of medical aid, the Church believes that this aid should be maximum effective and accessible to all members of society, regardless of their financial means and social status, also in the situation of limited medical resources. To make the distribution of these resources truly equitable, the criterion of «vital needs» should prevail over that of «market relations».

I likewise agree with Olson that snobbery and hubris – these two appear to be synonymous with the passions of vainglory and pride – are common failings on the political right, though they are far from exclusive to the right. Olson seems to be angling after a particular anthropology or genealogy of the American right, with his observations of these sins: a genealogy which is rooted in its class origins and in its religious origins. I’m a trifle uncomfortable with this genealogical account of conservative sins for, I guess we can call them ‘Quakerdox’ reasons (and, yes, I’m aware of the irony), but fine, we may take it as read.

Olson accuses the Republicans of entertaining, too often, a kind of white and Protestant intégrisme, which elevates the (private, devotional, pietistic) religious concerns of the holders of power over considerations of policy – that theological failings are tantamount to political failings. I kind of get this complaint, and I share it. But he’s treading out on some very thin anthropological ice. The common roots of sæcular law and religious law are more deeply entangled than he wants to permit, and the common roots of morality and religious devotion as well:

Historically, both religious and secular laws originate from the same source. Moreover, for a long time they only represented two sides of one legal field. This idea of law is also characteristic of the Old Testament.

The Lord Jesus Christ, in calling those faithful to Him to the Kingdom that is not of this world, separated the Church as His body from the world lying in evil. In Christianity, the internal law of the Church is free from the spiritually-fallen state of the world and is even opposed to it. This opposition, however, is not the violation but the fulfilment of the law of the divine Truth in its fullness, which humanity repudiated in the fall. Comparing the Old Testament norms with that of the Gospel, the Lord in His Sermon on the Mount calls people to seek the full identity of life with the absolute divine law, that is to deification: «Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect».

At the same time, though, the law is written upon all human hearts; the law is made for all and all are bound to it, regardless of what religious beliefs they hold. There is a certain basic level of human dignity which cannot be reduced to mere religious belonging. Again, the Russian Orthodox Church on the subject:

Among the oldest monuments of the written language are numerous collections of homilies and statutes. Undoubtedly, they go back to the even earlier, pre-alphabet, existence of humanity, since «the work of the law» is written by God in human hearts. Law has been there in the human society from times immemorial. The first rules were given to man as far back as the paradise time. After the fall, which is violation by man of the divine law, law becomes a boundary and trespassing against it threatens the destruction of both the human personality and human community.

The law contains a certain minimum of moral standards compulsory for all members of society. The secular law has as its task not to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but to prevent it from turning into hell. The fundamental principle of law is: «do not do to others what you would not want to be done to yourself».

So I would go along with Olson happily, as long as what he is critiquing is a certain vainglorious image of homo conservativus, a certain false idol of the self which American conservatives are sometimes wont to lug around with them: an idol of the self in which sentimentality and private devotion (or worse yet, self-interest masquerading as piety!) substitute themselves for actual works of mercy. Merely going through the performative motions of religiosity is no substitute whatsoever for actual works of kindness and justice, true mortification of the will, true acts of courage. He and I can agree all day long on that count. As Khomyakov put it:

He who loved truth and righteousness and defended the weak against the strong, who fought against corruption, tortures and slavery, is a Christian, if only to some extent; he who did his best to improve the life of the workers and to brighten the wretched lot of the classes oppressed by poverty whom we cannot as yet make quite happy, is a Christian, if only in part.

But Olson only partially frees himself from the objections to such idolatry, because of the abject and even idolatrous hero-worship of Ronald Reagan which suffuses his article. Olson engages in the sæcular canonisation of a figure who (again, despite some protectionist flourishes he made as California governor and in his second term as president) possibly did more than any other to retrench the ideas of market fundamentalism on the American right, in a way that had not held sway since Calvin Coolidge. In an article which is meant to explore the sins of the American right, such an emphasis – at best – lacks good taste. At worst, it seems to be an admission of cluelessness with regard to how the American right arrived in its current plight.

Again, I don’t want to come down too hard on either of these authors. In many ways, they are doing better than I am: they are engaged in the hard and necessary work of metanoia on behalf of their respective political communities; and allowances are certainly to be made for excesses of overcorrection, or for lacunæ in the rearward view so dearly held. And I’m sure that there are such lacunæ and such overcorrections in my own idiosyncratic syncretic political views, which are themselves grown out of the crooked timber of sexual fantasies and utopian dreaming, which I have yet to address. I applaud the bravery of these two authors for the conversation they have begun.

EDIT: I cannot believe I posted something about the deadly sins without also referencing Maiden’s Seventh Son album. Bad hesher! Bad! Ahem. At any rate, here to make up for it is ‘Can I Play with Madness’:

Holy Father Cyndeyrn Garthwys, Wonderworker and Bishop of Glasgow

Saint Cyndeyrn of Glasgow

Today in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day of Saint Cyndeyrn of Glasgow, a Brythonic saint of Yr Hen Ogledd and one of the great evangelists of the Scottish nation. He is known to Harry Potter fans in particular by his pet-name of Saint Mungo.

Saint Cyndeyrn [also Kentigern and, as mentioned, Mungo] was a child of an act of violence, the offspring of Saint Teneu after she was deceived and raped by Owain mab Urien. His grandfather, King Lot, tried to have him killed in utero along with his mother by having her driven in a chariot off of Traprain Law. When this failed to kill her and her unborn child, and by the power of her prayers to Christ and the Theotokos her chariot landed at the bottom of the cliff as lightly as a bird might light on a branch, she was suspected of being a witch and placed on a hide coracle and cast adrift at sea to die. However, Teneu delivered Cyndeyrn as soon as she cast up on shore in the boat at Culross, where she and her infant were taken into the care and protection of Saint Serbán. Saint Teneu would later leave Culross to enter a much happier union with Dingad ap Nudd, and she would give Cyndeyrn five further legitimate half-brothers by blood, including Saint Eleri of Gwytherin.

Cyndeyrn was raised from a very early age by Saint Serbán, who gave him his nickname of Mungo, which is a Brythonic cognate Mwyn-Gu derived from the Gælic words mo ‘my’, and cóem ‘dear, beloved’. The Life of Cyndeyrn holds that Saint Serbán exclaimed something like this – ‘mo chóhe! mo chóhe!’ – when he first came across Teneu, in her exhaustions of childbirth, and her newborn son who lay on the sand wrapped in swaddling. Seeing early on that the lad had an aptitude for reading and writing, Saint Serbán tutored him in all sorts of sæcular learning. Even as he grew in the knowledge of reading and writing, Cyndeyrn also improved in the natural virtues. He never spoke anything that was not sweet or beautiful or wise, understanding the voice as an instrument for praising God.

Seeing the favour that their master lavished upon the young ‘Mungo’, his other students began to envy him, and secretly plotted against him. Now, Saint Serbán had befriended a wild little red bird, that was wonted to eat out of his hand; this bird in its simple obedience and delight in Saint Serbán was also much coveted by the students. The boys caught this bird and, playing roughly with it, wrung its neck and killed it. They then attempted to place the blame for this deed on Cyndeyrn, who was wholly innocent of their rough games. Saint Serbán was greatly angered on seeing that his pet had been killed, and promised severe punishment on its killer. But Cyndeyrn meekly went and picked up the dead bird, fixed its head in the right place, and made the sign of the Cross on its tiny breast, and breathed upon it with a prayer. The bird at once revived and flew off toward his master, who saw all that took place.

Saint Cyndeyrn as a youth did many other like wonders at Culross. One time, as he was keeping vigil, his jealous schoolmates put out all the lamps and wicks on Culross so that he would have no light; young Cyndeyrn left the place to find growing a hazel branch. This he prayed to God to light with fire, and like the burning bush that was shown to Moses it was lit but gave off no heat, and he brought it back to Culross to the amazement of Saint Serbán and the other youths. On another occasion, Saint Cyndeyrn raised from the dead the abbey cook, whose service was so indispensable to Culross – through tearful and fervent prayers to Christ.

Eventually the envy of the other students became too much for Cyndeyrn to bear, and he left the monastery at Culross. Saint Serbán pursued him, but he was cut off at the bridge by a surge of water in a river that swept the bridge out. Serbán implored his Mungo to return to him, that in his age he might have some comfort in his waning years. Yet Cyndeyrn was steadfast, and gave him to know the reasons for his leaving. When master and pupil departed at last, it was amicably and with mutual blessings, but the bridge would remain impassable ever after that.

Saint Cyndeyrn visited a holy man named Fergus, a one-time companion of Saint Drostan who was suffering from a mortal illness, and attended him in his final pains before his repose. He took Saint Fergus’s body and placed it on a cart behind two oxen, whom he bade go where the Lord willed them to go. The oxen bore the cart all the way to Glasgow, into the yard by the church founded there by Saint Ninian, and there Saint Fergus was laid to rest.

There Cyndeyrn settled, too, living with two brothers named Telleyr and Anguen. These two brothers had very different personalities. One of them, Anguen, was meek and quiet and hospitable, and he waited on Cyndeyrn as though he were an angel. The other, Telleyr, was a hard and proud man who did not like Cyndeyrn one bit, and made no secret of it. The saint took both Anguen’s ministrations and Telleyr’s abuses with equanimity, and treated both men equally. Indeed, he kept a close watch over his tongue such that he dared not speak an ill-tempered word to any. But though Anguen and his children took the saint’s words to heart, Telleyr grew the more perverse. Finally, Telleyr, having upbraided Cyndeyrn in a fit of anger and stormed out of the house, went off to his work. Because his heart was cast into paroxysms of wrath and pride, he saw a large tree in his way and yarked it out of the ground, bearing it on his back. But he didn’t get far, as he tripped over a rock and sprawled to earth – the tree crushed him and he died. When Cyndeyrn heard of this, he chastised himself for not having checked his tongue, and grieved over Telleyr with many tears, and took Telleyr’s burial into his own charge.

Saint Cyndeyrn continued to work wonders among the poor people of Cumbria. It thus fell out that the king in that land, and what few Christians there were, decided to anoint Cyndeyrn as a bishop. Cyndeyrn was not pleased with this decision, and argued against it: that he was too young, that he was incapable, and that he did not want to disturb his inward peace. And yet the Christians of Cumbria all urged the contrary, with repeat urgency, such that Cyndeyrn was forced to acknowledge the workings of the Holy Spirit and assent to be made a bishop, with his seat at Glasgow.

Cyndeyrn adhered to a strict fasting rule, and abstained from meat and intoxicating beverages. He would moderate his fasts when breaking bread with sæcular people, but afterwards he would redouble his efforts to fast as if he were atoning for a crime. When he celebrated the Liturgy, he did so with the greatest and most self-effacing of reverences. It was said of him that a shining spirit in the form of a dove would light upon him when he administered the Gifts. During the Lenten season he would always disappear from the sight and sound of other human beings, and live in a desert solitude for the duration of the fast.

He took care in his clothing, always to wear a hair shirt close to his skin. Outwardly, though, he wore a shimmering white garment and a stole. In this he quite resembled the later Saint Éadgýð of Wilton who mortified herself with humility inwardly but who would not deprive the world of her beauty. Like his fellow Celtic saints Colum Cille and Cóemgen, he made his bed on a hard rock; and he had the practice of reciting the Psalms while submerging himself naked up to the neck in the Clyde, similar to that practiced by Saints Dewi, Pedrog, Cóemgen and Neot.

Saint Cyndeyrn spoke out volubly against hæresies, and was a particular foe of Pelagianism and the practice of simony. He had particular admonitions for those who professed the Christian faith but did not follow its precepts, and he worked with particular zeal in converting the Celtic pagans to Christianity, who still made up the most of the people in Cumbria at the time. Like Saint Aidan, Saint Cyndeyrn refused to ride a horse, but went evangelising on foot – a similar practice in more modern times was followed by Serbian Patriarch Pavle of blessed memory. Like Saint Boniface he was a particular foe of the pagan custom of incest. On the other hand, Saint Cyndeyrn was not averse to blessing unequal unions between newly-baptised men and their concubines or kept women, and turning those (in cases where the man had only one woman) into real marriages on more equal footing. Joscelin of Furness’s hagiography of Saint Cyndeyrn is actually illuminating in several ways with regard to how early Christendom transfigured pagan sexual mores, but a bit more on that later.

Saint Cyndeyrn wrought a number of wonders as bishop. At one time, when there was a shortage of oxen, Cyndeyrn called deer out of the nearby woods. These came out in obedience to the saint in the place of oxen, and pull ploughs as though they were tame beasts. Some time afterward, an opportunistic wolf took advantage of the tame deer and tore the throat out of one of them; Saint Cyndeyrn caught the wolf and bade it take the yoke in place of the deer – and the wolf submitted willingly, as though ashamed. Once the wolf had ploughed across nine acres of field, Cyndeyrn set it free into the woods. At another time, Saint Cyndeyrn had given away all the grain, including the seed corn, to feed the poor in the midst of a drought. So he sowed the fields instead with sand, praying to Christ all the while. And behold: the sand shot forth green shoots, then budded and ripened with corn. This agricultural wonder of Saint Cyndeyrn drew a number of new converts to Christianity.

Cyndeyrn’s successes drew the envy and ire of a local prince, Morcen Mwynfawr. Morcen boasted to Cyndeyrn of his wealth and scorned the teachings of Christ; and thus Cyndeyrn manifested a wonder by which the waters of the Clyde flooded into Morcen’s barns and swept out all of his grain, depositing it dry and whole at a certain desert place where Cyndeyrn was wont to spend time. From there Cyndeyrn took the grain and distributed it all amongst the poor. Morcen’s heart was hardened by this wonder, and he summoned Cyndeyrn to him and proceeded to beat the holy man mercilessly with his shoe. Morcen later died of a tumour which had lodged in his foot. However the long-suffering Cyndeyrn was forced to flee into Wales, to dwell amongst his kinfolk.

While in Wales, he met and befriended Saint Dewi, who greeted him with great hospitality at Mynyw; and there Cyndeyrn was induced to stay for some time, for the theological discourse of Saint Dewi was sweet to his ears and the two of them understood each other in the manner of holy friends. Indeed, Cyndeyrn built a little church not far off from Mynyw – at Llangyndeyrn in Dyfed. Dewi was not at all jealous of his northern friend, however, and word of Cyndeyrn’s holiness spread far. He was soon invited to build a monastery, and Cyndeyrn agreed. Taking leave of his friend, Cyndeyrn ventured into the north country – Gwynedd – after following a wild boar who led him into a suitable desert place on the banks of the Elwy. Despite having the blessing of Cadwallon Llawhir ap Einion, the prince of the north, Cyndeyrn and his disciples were nonetheless harassed at first by Cadwallon’s son Maelgwn Gwynedd (both of whom are Cooper ancestors, if the old genealogies are right), who laid waste to their monastery. It was only when Maelgwn was stricken blind and he went to Cyndeyrn to heal him (which he did) that he left the monks of Llanelwy in peace.

It was around this time that the child Asaph – another scion of Yr Hen Ogledd – was brought to Saint Cyndeyrn. Cyndeyrn cared for Asaph, and indeed valued and venerated him, in much the same way that Saint Serbán had once done for him. Saint Asaph himself performed miracles as a child, indicative of his sanctity and purity of heart – most famously bringing Cyndeyrn, when he asked for light, live embers inside his cotte without being burnt.

Saint Cyndeyrn made several pilgrimages to Rome; and on one of these he met with Saint Gregory Dialogos, who then reigned as the Pope of Rome. It was shortly after he returned that the new king in Yr Hen Ogledd, the great Rhydderch Hael, invited Cyndeyrn to return to Glasgow to resume his former bishopric. Cyndeyrn left Llanelwy in the care of his beloved student Saint Asaph, and returned as he was bidden to Glasgow.

Saint Cyndeyrn returned to Glasgow in triumph, performing wonders along the way. He came to Hoddom where he preached the Gospel to a great multitude of northern Britons. Many of them came to believe, and assented to be baptised, and so Cyndeyrn was employed day and night. Though that land had suffered drought the season before which the idols of the Brythonic heathen could not lift, after Cyndeyrn’s sermon and baptisms the clouds broke open and it began to rain, restoring fertility to the soil. All there gave praise to the risen Christ for His mercies. Rhydderch Hael himself came to meet Cyndeyrn with joy, and even took off his symbols of office and bent his knee to the holy man in token of the awe in which he went of him. He did Cyndeyrn the same honours that Emperor Saint Constantine had once done to Saint Silvester.

Saint Cyndeyrn worked another miracle of fertility – this time for Rhydderch Hael’s hitherto-barren wife Languoreth. It was not long after Cyndeyrn gave her his blessing, that Languoreth found she was able to conceive. Rhydderch Hael begat several daughters by Languoreth – including Gwladys and Angharad – and a son, named for Emperor Constantine. This son would become Saint Custennin of Strathclyde and Gowan.

The Life of Saint Cyndeyrn also notes that he was also close friends with Saint Colum Cille. When the two of them first met, Colum Cille at once identified Cyndeyrn among the men present in the church, and when asked how he had done so, the abbot of Iona replied: ‘I see a fiery column in the manner of a golden crown, interlaced with starry gems, descending from heaven onto his head. And a light of æthereal brightness envelops and surrounds him in the likeness of a veil, which covers him and then again returns to the æther.’ Thereafter the abbot of Iona and the bishop of Glasgow were happy to speak together for hours on holy things, and loved above all else to be in each other’s company. At one time, Cyndeyrn and Colum Cille exchanged croziers as a token of their friendship; one of these found its way into the possession of Saint Wilfrið of Ripon, who kept it in his monastery for a number of generations afterward and allowed it to be publicly venerated as a holy relic of both men.

Saint Cyndeyrn raised, as became a custom for him, a number of stone crosses throughout the Old North, like the one in Aspatria which still stands. These crosses put devils to flight, and thus were used to perform exorcisms and to cure mental illnesses by the people who venerated them. Cyndeyrn is also associated with a holy well in Glasgow Cathedral, which was the site of pilgrimages throughout the High Middle Ages.

St Mungo’s Well, Glasgow Cathedral

Saint Cyndeyrn lived to an ancient old age, and suffered from various infirmities of the joints in his later years such that he ended up having to bind his jaw up with a cloth. He took the Viaticum and exhorted his disciples to keep the true doctrines of the church, the love of Christ, the love of each other and the hospitality and generosity toward strangers that he had tried his best to teach them. He reposed in peace and went to Christ in the company of His saints on the thirteenth of January, 612.

It’s worth considering the Life of Cyndeyrn from the following perspective as well. The neo-pagans who think that European paganism was in any way more permissive than Christianity in pelvic matters are simply deluding themselves. Largely – but not solely – through the likes of Marion Zimmer Bradley (who clearly had her own hang-ups), Christendom has been falsely but popularly imagined as a kind of foreign repression imposed on gender-egalitarian, sexually-liberated nature-loving Northern European pagans.

The people who practised the pre-Christian religions of Europe were in fact even MORE strict about sexual matters than the Christians were, to the point of torturing and executing young people caught in ‘the act’, as they tried to do with Saint Teneu. The reason was precisely patriarchal pride. When your gods are quite literally emblematic of your ancestors, disobedience to the lineage – particularly a disobedience done with your body – becomes one of the most egregious blasphemies.

Early Christianity kept the old sexual taboos largely in place as a means of protecting the dignity of the weak. But it also worked to undermine the social import of these taboos. Under the old pagan strictures applied by King Lot in the case of his daughter Teneu, sexual abstinence is mandated so that one doesn’t shame his or her fathers. Christendom kept the emphasis on abstinence, but not because failing to abstain heaps shame upon one’s forefathers. The more immediate concern is love of neighbour. Christianity’s concern in upholding sexual strictures is the well-being of the other as the image and likeness of God. Thus, even though Christianity will not condone sins of the flesh, at its very best it also does not take the sins of the fathers out on the children!

This is attested in several ways in the Vita of Saint Cyndeyrn. Cyndeyrn does speak out harshly in some ways about sexual sins, including incest and homosexuality. When he arrives in Glasgow Cyndeyrn annuls marriages contracted between close kin among the nobility, while blessing the unions of men and women of unequal social status. In another case, he casts out of the church a priest who had kept male lovers. But consider: an unborn infant who was cast out and sentenced to death by his grandfather for being an unacknowledged bastard, would one day become one of the greatest missionary saints of Scotland, to be venerated by the very people who ran his mother off of Traprain Law. It’s quite difficult to think of a more radical subversion of pagan sexual taboos than that. Holy hierarch Cyndeyrn, dearly beloved one of Scots and Cumbrians and English alike, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Thy name, most radiant ascetic and wonderworker,
All-praised and great Father Cyndeyrn Mungo,
Which means ‘dear friend’,
Is godly sweetness to our wretched ears.
Thus named by thy tutor who foresaw thy missionary service,
Thou wast the truest friend and pastor to the Britons of Strathclyde.
Wherefore, O Saint, befriend us in this hour of need
That we may labour for Christ, as He wills,
And thereby be found worthy of His great mercy!

St Kentigern’s Church, Caldbeck, Cumbria

Happy birthday, Confucius!

Today is the 2,570^th birthday of China’s great sage and classicist, Confucius 孔丘. A massive celebration is taking place in Confucius’s hometown of Qufu 曲阜.

Anyone even the slightest bit familiar with my earlier work on this blog would be aware that I consider Confucius to be one of my most profound intellectual influences, and he has been since my college days. I was drawn in particular to the peculiar radical communitarianism and familialism of the Master’s political thought, and that unfortunately led me to embrace a certain polemicism against Western (and one or two Chinese) ‘public intellectuals’ who wanted to misrepresent and coöpt Confucius for libertarian, and liberal and neoliberal projects. I felt (and still feel) that these projects are, at a certain basic level, inimical to the entire political dimension of his philosophy. It also led me to seek out and identify with a broad range of figures in Chinese left-populist politics (Wen Yiduo 聞一多, Jimmy Yen 晏陽初, Liang Shuming 梁漱溟, Tao Xingzhi 陶行知, Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, Wang Hui 汪暉, Wen Tiejun 溫鐵軍 and Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元) as well as a range of figures in Chinese traditionalist conservatism (Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒, Hou Fangyu 侯方域, Chen Zilong 陳子龍, Gong Zizhen 龔自珍, Wei Yuan 委員, Lin Zexu 林則徐, Zhang Zhidong 張之洞, Gu Hongming 辜鴻銘 and Jiang Qing 蔣慶) who drew upon the strands in Confucius’s thought that I most strongly identified with.

There is something of a deep irony to this. I am a white Midwestern American with English, Scottish, German, Danish, Czech-Jewish and Yugoslav ancestry (albeit one married to a Chinese national and father of two mixed-race kids). I have never considered myself, rightly speaking, a Ruist. That would involve a certain religious commitment which I felt it improper for me to embrace, not least because I truly do believe that Jesus Christ was God Incarnate who came to save the world from death. And yet I still feel a certain affinity for and protectiveness toward this tradition that is not mine.

Honestly, I also think my intellectual love affaire with Ruism also impacted my Christianity in several important ways. For one thing, I was struck by the central importance of ritual (li 禮) in the thought of Confucius. Ritual figures as one of the cardinal human virtues alongside love, justice, wisdom and trustworthiness. Ritual is one of the two key implements – the other being music – of establishing the legitimacy of a political order. Ritual also plays a key rôle in mediating the self-institution dialectic, and thus is necessary to a well-ordered human life. Confucius’s reverence for ritual was one of the things that drew me to higher Liturgical forms of Christianity: first to High Church Anglo-Catholicism, and then to Orthodox Christianity.

For another thing, my Christianity has clearly been impacted by the familial-religious elements of Ruism. I do mean this in an intellectual sense, of course. Filial piety and familialism should be particularly important to Christians with a political witness, as they form an important bulwark against the pernicious ideologies that seek to supplant them: racialism, kinism and ethno-nationalism. But I also mean this in a personal sense.

The folk custom, blessed by the Ru way, of venerating ancestors has also led me to embark on a hagiographical project / series here, examining in some depth the pre-Schismatic English (and related Frisian, German and Scandinavian) saints. This is not just an intellectual exercise for me; indeed, the icon of Saint Boniface up on my wall is for this very purpose. The faith I practise is not for my benefit only; it is connected to that faith which was embraced by my forefathers, and their prayers aid me. But this hagiographical project is not only personal; it has led me to some surprising conclusions about the nature of my own cultural and temporal belonging and that of the cultural ‘moment’ in general.

At any rate, from another ‘Western Confucian’ – but not that one – many happy returns of the day, Master Zhongni!

Venerable Mildþrýð, Abbess of Minster-in-Thanet

Saint Mildþrýð of Thanet

The thirteenth of July is the Orthodox feast day of Saint Mildþrýð [or Mildred] of Minster-in-Thanet, the descendant of Saints Æþelberht and Berhte of Kent, called ‘fairest lily of the English’ by her Benedictine hagiographer Goscelin de Saint-Bertin: ‘a protector of widows and orphans, and comforter of all the poor and afflicted, and in all things she was humble and gentle.’

Her Kentish royal heritage is a main feature of each of Saint Mildþrýð’s hagiographies. She was the daughter of Saint Æbbe (also yclept Domne Eafe or Eormenburg, feast date: 19 November) by her marriage to Merewalh of the Magonsætan; Æbbe being the daughter of Eormenræd King son of Éadbald King (and his wife Emma of Austrasia), son of Æþelberht and Berhte. Mildþrýð was the second of four children, all of whom are considered saints; the others being her sisters – later nuns – Mildburg of Much Wenlock (23 February) and Mildgýð of Northumbria (17 January), and her youngest brother Merefinn who died in his early youth. When their child-getting days were past, Saint Æbbe and Merewalh separated by mutual consent and left their children, their property and themselves to the care of God in the Benedictine Order.

Mildþrýð was sent for her education to the Benedictine Abbaye Notre-Dame-des-Chelles in Neustria – situated on a site now a short ways southeast of Paris. While she was a pupil at this cloister, she apparently caught the eye of a Frankish nobleman who was related to the abbess, Wilcoma. This nobleman importuned the Abbess of Chelles to push Mildþrýð to accept his hand. The abbess thus entreated her, but the young woman replied to her superior that she had been sent to Chelles to be taught, not to be married. The frustrated abbess began to scold her, threaten her and beat her, but Mildþrýð was steadfast in her refusal. At last Abbess Wilcoma, like the wicked king Nebuchadnezzar, dragged her by the hand into a heated oven, and threw her inside. The abbess kept her inside for three hours, expecting not only her flesh but her very bones to have been burnt to cinders. However, even after three hours, there could be heard swan-like strains of fair and pure music within. Just as God had preserved His witnesses Hananiah, Misha’el and ‘Azariah from the wrath of the evil king and the flames of the furnace, so too did He preserve His beloved daughter from the flames and deliver her forth not only unharmed, but shining with joy, fairer than ever. Those nuns who saw this were greatly afraid, and fell on their faces before her as a living saint. But the evil and shameless Abbess of Chelles flew into one of those infamous Frankish-noble rages upon beholding this wonder, throwing her to the ground, beating her, kicking her, scratching her and tearing out her hair.

Somehow, poor Mildþrýð managed to collect some of her torn-out hair and enclosed it into a letter, which, by the grace of God, she managed to have smuggled out of the abbey back to her mother Æbbe in England, who sent for her at once. Ships were sent from the Magonsætan to Paris to fetch her, but Abbess Wilcoma would on no account permit her to leave, fearing that her corruption and cruel deeds would be exposed. Mildþrýð fled to the ships by night, but in her haste she forgot a relic – a nail of the True Cross – and some of her religious garments which she valued deeply. Before coming to the ships, she stole back to Chelles and brought them out safely.

The ships arrived at Ebbsfleet (so yclept because it was where Æbbe’s fleet made land with her daughter), and as Mildþrýð stepped off the ship onto a great square stone that lay off the wharf, the impress of her foot was shown wondrously carved into the stone’s face. This stone was later removed to Minster in memory of Mildþrýð’s return to England; it became known as a wonder-working relic of the virgin saint. It was often removed from its place of honour, however, until a fitting oratory was righted for it to be placed upon.

Mildþrýð was present when her mother Æbbe had consecrated the abbey at Minster. Æbbe had won the land, it seems, when her tame pet doe had been set loose across the isle of Thanet, and she received all the land that lay north of where her doe ran. (This explains why in Orthodox icons like the one shown above, Mildþrýð is seen to be holding a doe.) Finally, with her mother’s blessing, she got her wish when Saint Theodore of Tarsus himself bestowed the nun’s veil upon her along with seventy other women who desired the Benedictine life. As a nun, she was a particularly diligent pupil of Saint Aldhelm of Sherborne, not only in letters and music (for she sang the Psalms beautifully, according to Goscelin) but also in the disciplines of fasting and almsgiving, so essential to the life she had embraced. Her earthly and abbatial mother entrusted her early on with weighty tasks: in 694 she was sent in Lady Æbbe’s place, with the full dignity of an abbess, to represent Minster at a Kentish moot at Beccancelde.

The venerable Mildþrýð succeeded her saintly mother upon her death as abbess of Minster; and the holy foundress and abbess Æbbe was very quickly recognised as a saint thereafter. As for the new Abbess Mildþrýð – as alluded above, she took very seriously the fullness of the Benedictine commitment to the poor, the sick and the needy. She is described as unwearyingly mild, befitting to the full her birth-name, as well as loving and kind in her personal demeanour. Mildþrýð’s noteworthy material aid and service to the poor, the sick, the widows and the orphans was a sublime example for her daughter-nuns to follow, and her hagiographers note that the esprit de corps of Minster under Saint Mildþrýð’s gentle rule was one of self-emptying charity.

There is a legend in her hagiography that one night as Mildþrýð was praying Matins, the Evil One – who was jealous of her spiritual gifts and ascetic accomplishments – snuffed out the candle by whose light she was reading. In the dark she was unable to see to relight it. However, her angel guardian appeared and drove Satan back into the gloom, and by that angel’s radiant light Mildþrýð was able to continue her prayer and finish Matins – and she did so with heartfelt awe and gratitude.

Late in her life, Holy Mother Mildþrýð suffered from much bodily pain. The hurts of old age, however, she bore without complaint, though those who knew her well understood what she suffered without her having to speak or make any outward show of her ailment, and so they doubled their prayers for her. It so happened that one day she beheld a vision of the Holy Spirit descending upon her like a dove – first upon her forehead, and then upon her heart – and she knew that the end of her life was drawing near. She gathered her daughter-nuns about her and begged them to preserve the house of Minster in the same spirit of charity for each other and for the needy outside –

Maintain, my dearest ones, peace and holiness among yourselves, continue to love God diligently, and to do good to your neighbour. In the common needs of the monastery take counsel together, with all your hopes centred upon God, as beseemeth those dwelling in His courts. Lend a willing ear to the aged among you, and decide in all things with prudence. Bear ye one anothers burthens, obey mutually, be of one body and of one spirit, united in the observance of the Rule, true daughters of the house of God; and may the God of peace and of consolation abide for ever with you all!

With these parting words Mildþrýð received the Gifts one final time, and reposed in the Lord on the thirteenth of July, in either the year 725 or 732. Venerable Éadburg took her place as abbess. It was during Éadburg’s time that a certain young nun whose job it was to ring the bell fell asleep at the altar; and in a vision Saint Mildþrýð struck her awake, scolding her: ‘This is the oratory, not the dormitory!’

The pre-Schismatic English folk, prior to the Norman invasion, dearly loved their Holy Mothers – to an even greater degree, as we saw with Saint Æþelþrýð, than even their Holy Fathers. Saint Mildþrýð was no exception. Her popularity among the English, without doubt on account of her material charity and corporal works of mercy in life, outshone even that of Saint Augustine of Canterbury – as shown in the fact that the spot at which the Italian monk had met her great-great-grandfather became known instead as Saint Mildþrýð’s Rock!

In the centuries to come, English coasts would often be plagued by Danish raiders, and under the rule of the Danish Cnut, Mildþrýð’s relics would be translated (amid some rather heartfelt objections from the holy women of Thanet) to Canterbury in 1035. During the iconoclastic reign of Henry VIII, the monastery at Minster was dissolved, though it would be reëstablished prior to the Second World War, in 1937, by some German Benedictine nuns from the Abbey of Saint Wealdburg in Eichstätt, who bore with them one of Saint Mildþrýð’s holy relics!

One final note: a decided note of personal fondness I have for Saint Mildþrýð, is that she shares a name with my late grandmother – my father’s stepmother, Dr Mildred Cooper. A dynamic woman, strong-willed and fearless, she was a native (and fierce local patriot) of Buffalo, New York. In addition, she was a basketball player and a lifelong sports fan, and also a heartfelt champion of racial equality in the form of integrated public education in the DC school system. As a very young man and into my adulthood, I loved her and also somewhat awed and feared her. I was deeply grateful that she made it to Jessie’s and my wedding, and also that she liked Jessie almost at once upon meeting her. I don’t believe she was ever particularly religious – she was brought up Roman Catholic but was decidedly lapsed – but in some ways I can’t help but see a little bit of my grandmother in the hagiography of her namesake. I don’t think she would have put up with abuse in her schooling either – either of herself or of anyone else under her care! At any rate, for God’s handmaid Mildred, I beseech the intercessory prayers of her patron saint – and also for all of us sinners here. Holy Mother Mildþrýð, protectress of widows and orphans, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Through constant prayer and frequent fasting,
By ceaseless hymnody and great humility,
The glorious Mildþrýð forsook the allurements of her royal rank,
Trampling underfoot all worldly pride and presumption.
Wherefore, let us imitate her virtues,
That free from all earthly attachments
We may join her at the wedding feast of Christ our Saviour!

Speaking of ‘spiritual ethnicity’

Last month, blogger David Russell Mosley over at Letters from the Edge of Elfland on Patheos Catholic channel posted an interesting piece on ‘spiritual ethnicity’, which was prompted by his pondering the results of his genetic genealogy test from Ancestry.com. I enjoyed that piece greatly and want to offer something of a response to it, but before I go any further, I do want to reflect a little on this. The recent craze here for genetic genealogy – a craze I’m by no means immune from, by the way – has already had some intriguing effects on our public discourse. For one thing, it’s unfortunately nabbed Elizabeth Warren by the heel as soon as she got her presidential run off the ground. It’s a very interesting phenomenon, and I want to be sure to do it justice.

By that I mean, I don’t want to make any overly-hasty generalisations on this, because my own family’s experience has been so mixed. My father’s family never cared that much about the patrimony and the family line, for (as I was given to understand it) two reasons. Firstly, because poverty makes that stuff seem unimportant. When you’re living hand-to-mouth, crop to crop, debt burden to debt burden, what your dead great-grandparents did can start to seem a bit irrelevant to your life. Secondly, because living in the South – and living as a poor white person in the South – seems attendant with a particular burden of shame. I have a very deep respect for Grandpa Cooper, and for the sacrifices he had to make in his life in order to place himself. He fought his ghosts of poverty and shame, and he did so in a way that actively made room around him for people like his first wife, his children, and later his second wife – my step-grandmother. But despite that process and its results being something I find unquestionably worth remembering, treasuring and honouring – there was some deliberate, hard forgetting he chose to do as a result. The deep irony in that is not lost on me.

On the other side – my mother’s side, the Doanes – they have always treasured the family tree, even the parts of it that are inconvenient or that cut against the grain of the national mythology. On the other hand, we do have some real people in our family of whom we can be justly proud. My maternal grandfather and grandmother, for instance, both lived full – and what’s more important, good – lives. I remember describing my grandfather, a bit oxymoronically perhaps, but aptly, as ‘actively generous and aggressively peaceable’. And I meant every word. Can it be any wonder that the Doanes find such joy and conviviality in remembering truly good people like Holden and Laura? But it is not merely for these people that the remembrance holds, that’s the beauty of it. The Doane family, and the allied Camp family, are incredibly tight-knit and have immense family gatherings that are always a joy to visit – people come from opposite coasts, greet each other like family, and have a party. When there is happiness, everyone shares it, and the same when there is pain or sorrow: everyone condoles. Remembrance, even of the ‘bad’ times, becomes transfigured into something joyful and life-affirming.

So, how to make sense of this? The ‘Cooper’ and the ‘Doane’ approaches to remembrance are very different, even though both of them have inescapably shaped my own ‘spiritual ethnicity’, for whatever valence you want to attach to either word in that formula. If I’m being honest with myself, I would have to say that the shame-complex aspect that I seem to have inherited from the Cooper side of the line has done more to shape my spiritual trajectory than the New England Methodist conviviality of the Doanes. There’s a Southern Gothic ‘haunting’ in my relationship to God – something reminiscent of Capote, O’Connor or Williams – that I haven’t been able to quite figure out or square away yet. It’s shown up several times in my life, and I don’t think that’s something that I can easily dismiss.

Beyond that, though, my spiritual ‘roots’ lie in a confluence of peace church activism – inherited from my Quaker forebears and impressed further upon me by my Mennonite upbringing; High Church Anglican Tory contrarianism – a gift from college and from the good folks at Saint Stephen’s in Providence, which strangely enough has encouraged and informed my Russophile tendencies; and a certain Eastern European Jewish radicalism – which, in the process of having come to light again, has been strangely amplified and transmuted by my involvement in the Antiochian Church. Each of these stems of my spiritual ‘genetics’ has directed me – the fact that each of these things lies in my background has given indication of the shape which my spiritual path must take. Indication – not dictation.

That’s an important distinction. Nikolai Fyodorov, Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev were very quick to intuit the necessity of not only paying homage to one’s paternity, but actively loving them, to any kind of spiritual self-awareness. Fyodorov went as far as to say that it was our duty as a species to use our knowledge to resurrect our dead forefathers. This is why, in our prayer books, we are encouraged to pray for the health and salvation of our parents every morning. (This is also one of the reasons why I am writing such a lengthy series of hagiographical blog posts on the pre-Schismatic English saints.) But equally important, particularly when we use phrases like ‘spiritual genealogy’, is the necessary theological caution that genetics is not destiny. Even in the very Gospel of Matthew, in which the ancestry of Jesus is presented first and foremost, Saint John the Forerunner says not two chapters later unto the religious authorities: ‘Think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham!’ In the annals of the histories received from the Doanes and pieced together from the Coopers, individual choice as a factor within history appears inescapable, even if the content of those choices was highly constrained by the conditions under which they were made.

In the end, of course, I think David Mosley is right, that ‘more reflection reveals deeper truths’, and that temet nosce is good advice for all and always. But the Church has always needed both the introductory chapters of the Gospel of Matthew and of the Gospel of Luke. The Church needs both the ‘spiritual genetics’ of Christ and His Church (we cannot, after all, do without the Law and the Prophets in our unregenerate state), and the sublimely personal act in history of total obedience to God that marked the Theotokos apart from all of her forebears and set us free, in the radical and philosophical sense understood by the authors of the Greek Scriptures. It does not do merely to say we are sons by blood; we must, like the prodigal son coming to himself, become sons by choice.

Paradoxes of an assimilated Americanised quarter-Jew

My ambivalent, attenuated Jewishness often feels like a catch-22, as I’ve said before. On the one hand, even indicating it or pointing it out makes me feel fraudulent. A friend of mine, actually a former roommate of mine from college, posted this comment on Facebook:

Truth be told most Jews are not Jewish in any meaningful sense. They don’t go to Temple, don’t know their aleph beys, don’t keep the Sabbath, don’t keep kosher or observe Jewish law. They don’t speak Yiddish or Hebrew. They don’t marry within the faith and they don’t raise their kids Jewish.

I hasten to note that he wasn’t singling me out, or intending to single me out, with this comment. He was speaking to the state of American Jewishness generally. But I have to admit, that’s me all over, guilty as charged. I don’t keep kosher and don’t go to Temple because that’s not my religious tradition. I learned how to say the Sh’ma Yisroel, but don’t know any more Hebrew than that, and my Yiddish is limited to a couple of phrases my parents use. At best, I belong to the beta Gershom. My Jewish grandmother, halakhically speaking on the ‘wrong side’ of the family (my dad’s), married outside the faith and died young, never getting the chance to raise her children as Jews. So what the hell am I doing even calling attention? Isn’t that cheating? Isn’t that theft? Isn’t that appropriating something that isn’t rightfully mine? I am not and never have been a member of this community. Isn’t it presumptuous and officious to assume any kind of responsibility for it? I can’t stand it when American evangelicals, Messianics and the like put on cosplay as Jews, like Jewishness is their toy-box, to use Dr Weiss’s phrase. But when I talk about my family history, given the degree to which the Jewishness of that history has been watered-down in precisely the way that my former roomie describes, is what I do any better at all?

At the same time, pointedly not speaking about my immigrant Jewish grandmother, not saying anything about what this beautiful Wisconsin girl with my sister’s face in black-and-white photos has meant to me, also seems not only like a cop-out, but also like a kind of historical denial. It feels like participating in some kind of cover-up: like soaking a library in gasoline, dropping a lit match and walking away. History matters a great deal, even and especially if it’s the kind of history that might give you neuroses. It took me a very long time to realise and to process that when my Dad told me he ‘doesn’t have a Zionist bone’ in his body, he was giving voice to far more than just his politics. He was indicating, perhaps indirectly, an entire family history of doyikayt. Whether Bundism was their explicit politics or not, my foremothers and forefathers lived an entire way of being Jewish that was Yiddish, non-Zionist, localist and leftist - that I had no idea about prior to my high school years.

This may be expressed as a paradox: I am just enough of a Jew to be neurotic about not being one. Another paradox is that it is my Tory sensibility that militates in me that, whether I like it or not, I’m part of this localist-leftist Yiddish history. I don’t get to choose that, just like I don’t get to choose who my grandparents are. Given that, the least-bad option as far as I can tell, as it were my best plea for clemency, is to simply be humble and be honest about all of the foregoing, and allow others - Jewish and not - to come to their own determinations.

In fact, whatever falsity may be hidden in it, such honest, humble remembrance is all the more important now. The politics of the (Eastern) European far-right resurgence, its echoes on these shores, the violent Ukrainian, Polish and Hungarian nationalisms that have begun their steady creep out of the shadows of history, render this remembrance necessary and urgent. The far-right resurgence on both sides of the Atlantic not only summons old ideological ghosts, but it rhymes and pairs off all too neatly with the historic and resurgent nationalist pretensions of Israel as the only territorial safe haven for Jews, which must therefore be accomplished even if it means depriving Palestinian Arabs in perpetuity. These triple lies have to be confronted as one if the Jewish people will live in peace, either with their neighbours, their histories or, ultimately, their consciences. Historically, the group which confronted them the most convincingly were the Jewish localists.

I am not Jewish in a religious sense: whatever I have is only the assimilated-apostate Jewishness of Saint Constantine and Saint Bunakov. But I can remember those in my family who were Jewish, and I can remember the way that they were. It may be a vain and pretentious hope, but if there is even a chance that such an anamnesis can, even in some small and yet-unseen way, cut short a cycle of tragœdy that seems to be repeating itself, it should be made.

Through the silence of the guns

Soldiers receiving news of the Armistice, 11 November 1918

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.

　　　　- Kurt Vonnegut

Given that the end of the Great War happened one hundred years ago today, this seems as good a time as any to reflect on the reasons that Armistice Day was originally inaugurated. As the amnesiac great-grandson of a working-class Jewish immigrant soldier whose lungs were destroyed in this war, I am finding that this Armistice Day has for me a peculiar importance. It is not a celebration of war. It is not a celebration of those who wage war. It is a celebration of the end of a war – one that destroyed twenty million lives, including the Armenian, Arabic and Greek victims of the first modern genocides. It is worth considering why Vonnegut (himself a veteran of the Second World War who lived through the bombing of Dresden) thought of the ending of this war as something sacred, as a moment when God spoke through the silence of the guns.

After all, Vonnegut was not the straightforward pacifist he is popularly imagined to be. Even when Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions, he was nowhere even close to the naïve certitude of the pacifists of his childhood, that this war could end all wars. In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five (one of my favourite books, not coincidentally) he recounts a conversation he had with Harrison Starr to the effect that ‘there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers’. Vonnegut (and Starr) seem to have been proven right time and again, not just about the First World War. We can only truly end war when we can end the perversions of the human heart; and the fact that the human heart is universally perverse is every bit as evident as the fact that water will freeze below zero. But Vonnegut celebrated Armistice Day regardless, just as he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five regardless. There’s something cussedly admirable about a guy who understands that war is inevitable, and who will still throw his shoulders in trying to stop glaciers.

Even ‘inevitable’ wars have a certain terrible logic. When one studies the history of the Balkans, and clears away the miasma of clichés about the Balkans being a ‘powder-keg’, the Great War takes on a far different shape. The Balkans may have been a keg, but Europe’s great powers brought all the powder – the stoking of nationalist rivalries; the advent of factory and rail; the deprivation of the peasant under various forms of predatory lending, whether by village loan-sharks or by London and Frankfurt. Seen thus, the war becomes a kind of apocalypse, a tearing-away of the veil over the ‘civilised’ Victorian and Edwardian niceties of European politics – dominated as they were by high finance, industrial capitalism and nationalism, and a burgeoning machine-rationalism that was capable of completely subsuming the person. One of the great problems that Berdyaev, Solovyov, St Maria (Skobtsova) all had with the pacifism that dominated in their day, was precisely that it propped up an illusion of peace. A pacifism that seeks to ignore or explain away or whitewash these very real injustices and sicknesses of the human soul that underpin a presumably-stable liberal world order, is ultimately self-defeating – and in Solovyov’s view even a precursor of Antichrist.

But such a pacifism is very far from the only kind of witness for peace that there is. Those witnesses for peace that centre on the person in her depth, do (ironically) have a tendency to look more radical in a political sense, than those which seek for peace within a rationalistic exterior legal framework. But theologically speaking, any witness for peace that points back to the depths of the person, and of the human heart, has to be marked by an inner striving and an interior life marked by a search for the truth of Christ in quietude (not to be confused with quietism). Lest one think I am being a Byzantine chauvinist here, let me hasten to observe that one sees this kind of hesychasm not only in the tradition of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, but also in the West: Julian of Norwich, Lancelot Andrewes, Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is what Vonnegut points to in his brusque, laconic way. There’s a hidden genius in the original ceremonial of Armistice Day, which Vonnegut (along with the modern peace movement) asks us specifically to observe. It asks us to keep silence, in the remembrance of the guns that fell silence, and of the moment in which God spoke through the stillness. The quietude that came over the soldiers when the apocalyptic, relentless industrial machinery of death – the guns, the gas and the bombs – all fell silent: that is what Vonnegut asks us to remember. That moment of silence on Armistice Day therefore represents a kind of civic hesychasm, a quietude that cuts through all the false pieties and all the forms of idolatrous sentimentality whether nationalist or internationalist – and goes straight to the heart, to the inner man. And that is what renders it sacred.