Archbishop Saint John the Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco

Archbishop Saint John (Maksimovich)

At Saint Herman’s in Minneapolis (my beloved OCA parish here in the Twin Cities), the southeast corner of the sanctuary by the ikonostasis is occupied by the images of our church’s patron, Saint Mary of Egypt, Saint Seraphim (Moshnin) of Sarov and Saint John (Maksimovich) of Shanghai and San Francisco. Somehow one is drawn to this corner, as I am after every Liturgy. I ask for strength and endurance from Saint Mary of Egypt; to Saint Seraphim (the patron of Russia’s nuclear arsenal) I naturally address my prayers for peace. I don’t believe I’ve ever particularly asked of Saint John the Wonderworker anything in particular, but I’ve always venerated his icon in any event, never quite knowing why. It’s never even been the China connexion, which would appear obvious, or the fact that we are both ‘peregrinators’.

Saint John, born Michael Maksimovich to a landed Serbian family (which had settled in the governorship of Khar’kov and to which had also belonged the unmercenary friend to the poor Saint John of Tobolsk), was a sickly and quiet youth who nonetheless found a source of consolation and awe in the Church and the lives of the saints. He was taken under the wing of Metropolitan Antoniy (Khrapovitsky), who saw to his education. When the civil war came between the Communists and the Whites, the Maksimovich family fled to Serbia. One of his brothers became an engineer; the other joined the military under the Serbian Tsar Aleksandr Karađorđević. Young Michael studied at seminary, and there picked up a number of ascetic habits; however, he did not use asceticism as an excuse for self-display. Instead, his asceticism took the form of devotion to his fellows: he rarely slept, instead watching over his students and making the sign of the cross over them as they slept. The rest of his night hours he spent in prayer or at rest before icons.

He did not wish to be made bishop; indeed, when his superiors selected him as a young priest-monk to be made a bishop, he at first thought there was some mistake, and thus told a lady on a Beograd autobus that the hierarchs must have confused him with another monk named John. When the same lady saw him the next day, he told her sadly that it was indeed him they wished to make bishop. He had objected, claiming a speech impediment; to this they answered that Holy Prophet Moses had suffered from the same.

He was made bishop of the Orthodox Church in Shanghai, and made it his personal task to orient that church (no pun intended) to being a haven for refugees, orphans, the poor and disenfranchised. Vladika John began catechesis classes and established a parish school for young people, as well as supporting various orphanages and shelters. One of these, he dedicated to another great friend of the poor and advocate for œconomic justice, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk! In the orphanages under his care, he made no distinctions between Russian, Greek, Serbian or Chinese; all were welcome and all were considered as children of God. Vladika John was not apolitical; his sympathies were strongly engaged on behalf of Tsar Nicholas II, who was murdered by the revolutionaries. But his was not a call to political violence or reaction, but instead to moral and spiritual renewal: the repentance of the entire Russian people.

Vladika John served as a bishop of the churches of the Russian diaspora in Paris and in San Francisco as well as in Beograd and Shanghai. He was remarkable not only for his inspired insights into ‘hidden things’ (a mark of wonderworking saints) nor for the miracles which manifested to those in his flock, nor even for the well-known rebuke which he issued to the slightly-wayward ‘intelligentsia’ of Paris (in particular Fr Sergei Bulgakov). But further: he was remarkable for his gentleness and calm, for his humour, for his simplicity of spirit and his (dare I say it?) here-hood, reflecting that of the Holy Theotokos. Indeed, it is precisely expression that I see on his icon every week at Church. He is gentle; he is smiling; he is simple (which is not by any means to say ‘stupid’, but rather single in his eye, trained on Christ). Somehow he managed this simplicity and ‘here-hood’, despite having been schooled at seminary, despite having been evacuated multiple times from the ravages of war, despite having survived upheavals of Communist revolutions in two countries. He never responded nor requited these misfortunes of his life with bitterness, nor did he meet the questions of it with empty abstraction; he was simply here.

Again, I see this face upon the icon with all its patience and gentleness and warmth. That gentleness itself is a stinging rebuke to my own double-mindedness and preoccupation with worldly cares, but somehow the rebuke itself is not a hard one to bear. Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco was known for his foreknowledge of his parishioners’ needs without them even needing to ask. Is it the case that, even though I didn’t know what to ask or even that I needed to ask, he saw my need and answered it before I uttered a word? Holy Father John (Maksimovich), pray to God for us sinners.

Lo, Thy care for thy flock in its sojourn
Prefigured the supplication which thou dost ever offer up for the whole world.
Thus do we believe, having come to know thy love, O holy hierarch and wonderworker John.
Wholly sanctified by God through the ministry of the all-pure Mysteries
And thyself ever strengthened thereby,
Thou didst hasten to the suffering, O most gladsome Healer,
Hasten now also to the aid of us who honor thee with all our heart.

Attacks on Romani and Jews in the Ukraine must end

This past week, a camp of Romani outside the city of L’vov was attacked by a gang of fascist hooligans. One Roma teenager was killed. Eight suspects – all local young men from L’vov – have been apprehended and claim membership in a radical-right ‘straight edge’ group, but higher authorities wasted no time blaming Russia for the attack. This attack is, however, the latest of a series of violent pogroms against Roma and Jews in the Ukraine, carried out by right-wing youths, and is part of a rising trend of violence against minorities by right-wing ‘angry youth’, often aided, abetted and ignored by Ukrainian police. Oftentimes, Romani are afraid to come forward because they know the police are on the side of their attackers. Strangely enough, this consistent uptick in right-wing violence against the marginalised dates back about four and a half years, and had not yet started when the Yanukovich government was overthrown.

Now, it is true that violence and discrimination against Romani (and Jews, and Rusins) is by no means unique to the Ukraine. It is also true that the Maidan is fundamentally a rightist-neoliberal project, and not one of the fascist far-right. However, whether knowingly or not, the neoliberal leaders of the Maidan enable and embolden the fascist far-right when they ignore it or when they attempt to dismiss it as solely a ‘Russian problem’. It is no longer credible (if indeed it ever was) to dismiss as ‘Russian propaganda’ the observation that the violence by the Ukrainian right wing has coincided with the rise of the Maidan movement.

Nationalism in the Ukraine is not benign; it has a long and sordid history of violence against minorities, particularly Jews. This is a legacy of the long mediæval Polish-Lithuanian influence (and later Austro-Hungarian and German influence) even on Orthodox spiritual life and political ethics in that country, and that history cannot simply be swept under the rug and ignored. Pointing to the linkages between that history and this modern crisis facing Carpathian Rusins, Ukrainian Jews, Romani and others is neither irrelevant nor ‘gaslighting’ as the partizans of present-day Kiev would like us to believe. Indeed, ignoring and downplaying these linkages presents us with the sordid face of yet another neo-colonialist ideology, the same which was presciently indicated several decades ago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

If police discrimination against Romani in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech and Slovak lands is unacceptable, so is this. These attacks against the Romani and the Jews by the far-right must end. State inaction and complicity in these attacks, now acknowledged by independent human rights groups, must end. The civil war – and yes, it is a civil war – in the Donetsk Basin must end. The linguistic discrimination against the Rusins must end. What is called for is repentance and moral renewal. What is called for is an actual return to the pluralism and radicalism of Kiev’s distant past – not merely a recitation of it for the sake of nationalist glory, pride and vengeance.

A gift of words from afar

I have rarely had the feeling that, in translation, I was getting less than half of the meaning implied in a work. But such was the case with The Ways of Childhood, the book by Metropolitan Georges Khodr of Byblos and Botrys. Though it is a work of epistolary and biographical non-fiction, about a dear friend in exile of the Metropolitan’s who remains anonymous without, I have few words to describe this work other than ‘prose poetry’, and even then the words I could spend on its description would hardly be equal to the task of praising it.

I’ve been praised for my writing before, on this blog and elsewhere. But reading the Metropolitan’s work I was suddenly put in mind of being a callow untrained tyro in the school of a world-renowned martial arts master, such was the lyrical craft of his sentences. In a few short phrases he could transmit the breath and life of an image, an event, an emotion, a habit. At times, a profound theological truth could be expressed in a mere seven or eight words – a breath, but to unpack it would already be to do it violence, like plucking a flower to examine its petals. The chapter titles themselves are examples of this: ‘Friendship Is the Place That Leads to God’, ‘Men Are Always Wounded by History’, ‘The Majority of Christians Have Not Yet Been Born’ and ‘Creation Is the Breath of Life’. If such is the effect of a translation, I have to marvel at His Eminence’s command of Arabic!

It’s hard to introduce this book, in part because it is so far-reaching, and in part because it describes the life of a certain delicate but deeply-sensitive Arabic worker-intellectual from his childhood on, in ways that touch upon every aspect of human life, from work to worship, from sex to friendship to national and civilisational belonging. Sayyidna Georges offers us a brief biography of his friend from his early childhood up to his sudden departure for a foreign country, followed by excerpts from nine of his ‘letters from exile’. What emerges is a touching portrait of an inner life touched from an early age by the light of Orthodoxy, and its attempt to live that light in a world which is as yet only ever imperfectly (at best) receptive to it.

The eponymous ‘child’ grows up surrounded by Muslims, impacted deeply by the Muslim calls to prayer, takes on a Western education, flees to a certain mountain village that has been impacted by a century and more of war and imperialism, undertakes a semi-eremitical existence, returns to the city life, is enchanted and disenchanted with church and nation, joins the labour movement and its struggles against capital and the police, falls in love with a woman, and then suddenly leaves the country without saying a word. The state of his inward life is revealed subsequently through his letters to Sayyidna Georges, who takes from them certain excerpts to do justice to his friend.

One can take a look at certain facets of this inward life. There is, on the one hand, a deep and passionate thirst for justice and hospitality for the downtrodden, which is not satisfied with nationalism or even anti-authoritarianism, but which insists emphatically on a ‘confrontation’ with the ‘new society’ and all its manifestations (not least of which those within our own psyches). ‘It is hypocritical to denounce only one kind of violence; by remaining silent about other kinds, we become objective accomplices. But woe to him by whom the offence comes!’ On the other hand, there is the deep sorrow with which he chastises the œcumenical movement, which he feels has cheapened the depth of the word of the Gospel in favour of ‘monotonous bureaucracy’, ‘boring papers’ and corporate ‘double-talk’. (And for one who treats the Word – the Living Word and the spoken word both – with such great awe and respect, that is no mere quibble.) He values education – he doesn’t disdain it or relativise it or individualise it the way modern American homeschoolers do; nor does he treat it as a mere instrument toward political or cultural indoctrination – instead, he sees it as a way of bearing forth the light of the Resurrection. At the same time, he sees the end of education a kind of simplicity and singleness of heart; at the same time as he acknowledges the dangers to both in becoming educated in the wrong way. ‘Reason is inseparable from our plunge into the body of the world… Æternal life is not the domain of intellectuals and scholars, but of those who are wounded and disfigured.’

He develops a particularly strong bond with the Russian émigrés who, like him, lead a life in exile in which they are burdened intolerably (as Mother Maria Skobtsova would have it) with a kind of boundless freedom, the freedom to become (if they choose) Christ-bearers in exile. There is a kind of brotherhood he expresses between his own Arabic soul and those of his Russian fellow-expats. This brotherhood is expressed through the natural Russian sympathy with the deprived and the poor. The Russian priest he meets in exile he holds up as a model of the self-sacrificial parish priest, giving himself ‘on behalf of all and for all’ as he gives to all his parishioners of the chalice he bears.

He is broad, seeing the value even in the Muslim tradition and its spiritual graces, without being relativist. ‘Christ is the æstuary into which flow the virtues and beauties dwelling within every religious tradition.’ Having been sickly from his youth, he pays special attention to the prayers of the Church for the sick, and treats sickness and health themselves as bearing witness to certain spiritual truths about the human soul and its indelible relationship to the body.

Reading back over this, it looks like I’ve given only the barest of possible overviews of this book, and haven’t done it justice at all. Presented here by Sayyidna Georges is no hectoring preacher, no new Victorian moralist: merely a living, suffering and sensitive human soul who has been wounded, and who speaks from a hidden fullness that is belied by and which comes from his wounds. Being as it is so deeply biographical and epistolary, it seems strange to call this a ‘spiritual’ or a ‘religious’ book, even though its perspective is profoundly Orthodox (and specifically Antiochian). I did indeed enjoy this book, but at the same time felt a strange kind of sweet sadness in reading it, the kind of sadness which comes of receiving a letter from a friend one has not seen in years.

Sayyidna Georges (Khodr)

Memories of a duck hawk

Nine years ago I started this blog specifically as a Peace Corps journal named Matt’s Existential Musings, and it’s kept me company in various forms throughout the years long after I left Peace Corps. Going back and reading my first entries from the MEM days, some of them strike me as painfully naïve. I’m not entirely sure that the ‘me’ of nine years ago would recognise the Matt Cooper writing these reflections now. Of course, there are some threads of commonality and some repeated themes that run through my writing even from then to the present time; and these have been refined and honed with deeper reading and learning, but more importantly through experience.

Anglican hatchery; German flight

When I started off out of college, I was primarily influenced by the works of liberal, latitudinarian Anglican and Episcopalian divines like Charles Gore and Frederick Denison Maurice who contributed to Social Gospel Protestantism. This was a result of having studied religion under Dr Gary Dorrien in college. After Dorrien left Kalamazoo for Columbia, I transferred to the philosophy department and began studying continental philosophy under Dr Chris Latiolais. The thinkers that I latched onto most heavily during this time were, of course, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, although my senior thesis was essentially a Hegelian / Marxist defence of the communitarian ideas of Dr Michael Sandel, whose work on justice continued to be influential on me after college.

Again, I look back now and I view my collegiate work as hopelessly naïve, incomplete, one-sided, detached from lived reality in a way which makes that same work’s fixation on lived realities seem all the more ironic and existentially-pathetic. But the same drive, the same desire to understand justice at a deeper level than that offered by the ubiquitous Lockean liberalism that makes up so much of American political discourse – that has never left me. Part of the reason I ended up joining Peace Corps was to make real those values which I had given voice to – but life hits you harder than you first expect.

A strong Eastern wind

Studying at Kalamazoo College, I took full advantage of the study abroad programme they offered there. The Chinese language very quickly became a passion of mine, thanks to the now semi-retired Dr Madeline Chu, though I had taken an interest in Chinese history since my high school area studies class on the subject, and also through the novels of Pearl S Buck and RH van Gulik. I decided to take a year abroad in Beijing, studying at Capital Normal University.

Once there, through Dr An Yanming, I encountered the philosophical traditions of Buddhism, the Zhuzi Baijia and – most importantly – Confucius. The ideas of Confucius as presented to me in the Analects appealed deeply to me – here was a man for whom justice (yi 義) in its full depth, was everything, and for whom the question of justice could not be detached from its social moorings – particularly ritual (li 禮). Only through ritual could justice be attained, with the final flower of that justice being love (ren 仁). Even though I understood that Confucianism and the Social Gospel Christianity in which I’d been brought up were two very different worldviews and religions, I couldn’t help but be impressed by their similarities and potential synergies. In one way or another, I have been approaching and grappling with these synergies throughout my entire intellectual life.

It pains me somewhat to own that for all its advantages, Kalamazoo College was only of limited help to me in pursuing these synergies. Even though the study abroad programme was truly a blessing and even though my professors did encourage me to take full advantage of it, when I came back it became clear that there was no space for Eastern philosophy to be had on campus. I had to go back to the religion department if I wanted to continue studying Confucianism and Buddhism with any degree of seriousness (which I did). I have never, however, stopped taking Confucius seriously on his own merits rather than filtering him through the lens of the German-idealist canon.

By the Silk Road back to a green England

Again, when I left college I sought after some form of real-life service, and I found it in AmeriCorps and Peace Corps. It was in preparation for Peace Corps that I first discovered the Orthodox Church – in fact, the same church in which I would become a member after coming back from China the third time: Saint Mary’s in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I also picked up a thin old cloth-bound volume at the Providence Athenæum, by a man who would come to be one of my foremost intellectual influences in life ever since. The book was The Russian Revolution. The man was Nikolai Berdyaev. His religious, personalist approach to the continental tradition of philosophy blew my mind: it was only on reading him that I came to understand Marxism as a religious heresy; through him and only through him, my rarefied undergraduate Marxism was transformed into something more clearly, self-awarely and cogently Christian again, something more human. He impressed me with the importance of the creative impulse even in considerations of the grand scale. He started me on the long and arduous process of holding my philosophical convictions up to life as a whole and seeing if they worked – a process I’m still on, by the way. Poets began having importance for me, too. Particularly the Qazaq Muslim poet Abai Qunanbaiuly, whose open and creative spirit in the Book of Words seemed to rhyme with what Berdyaev was saying philosophically.

I washed out of Peace Corps; partly a victim of my own bad habits, and partly a victim of bureaucratic CYA on Peace Corps’s part. I’ve got enough distance on it now where I can keep from beating myself up about it, and where I can acknowledge both my own failures and points at which the American government could have done more to help me succeed. Still – failure kicked my arse hard, sent me into a downward spiral. Reading Kurt Vonnegut helped. I didn’t do much intellectual work at all in the years to follow, even though I went back to school and took a few courses in œconomics and mathematics. I continued to delve into the moralistic Anglicanism of yore: I read William Laud and Richard Hooker and Hugh Latimer and Samuel Johnson and Ken Leach. I continued to be shaped by Gore and Maurice. I became an admirer of Newman and Pusey and the Oxford Movement. It was a beautiful socialism I wanted, a socialism fragrant with red roses and incense, a workers’ and families’ movement that bowed only before Christ the True King, and which would leave no man or woman behind, no matter how unfortunate – and sweep them all up into a glorious Renaissance polyphony of praise and thanksgiving to the Creator of All. I confess: that’s still a winged vision that I cherish.

Rebel without a class

My faith in that socialism would be deeply shaken by graduate school. I was still very much a do-gooder at heart, and I longed to be in a place where other do-gooders planned to do their good. And that place, as it turned out, was the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. (Yes, they encourage you to spell it all out that way on your résumé. I should have known then what I was getting into.)

I made close friends with the international students – the Chinese students, yes, of course, first and foremost, because I spoke Mandarin. But I also got close to Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Bengali, Senegalese, Kirghiz and Nepalese folk in Pittsburgh – mostly grad students like myself and, to top it off, mostly fish out of water themselves. But for the most part I was withdrawn into my own shell. I studied hard. I began reading George Grant, John Ruskin, Wang Hui, Jiang Qing and Peter Viereck, and my socialism began taking a hard consciously-conservative turn. I began to distrust the élites with whom I went to school, not least because I couldn’t start to tell with most of them where the self-promotion ended and where the actual work began. My rebellion was unconscious at first, and only became conscious when I started to realise that I was basically training to become my own public relations agent. I threw myself instead into the academic side of things – like a crazy man, I undertook both a capstone project and a senior thesis (even though GSPIA only required one of the two from me). The senior thesis marked a kind of distributist turn: I wanted to turn political and social power back to the neighbourhoods, back to the black communities that the ‘big planners’ and ‘urban renewal’ types had taken so much from, and I wanted them to do it using public, common spaces.

Problem was, I was turning out to be a ‘big planner’ myself. I couldn’t help it. I had an inkling of it while I was there, but the school was essentially designed to crank out three types of people: spooks, sophisters and superintending fussbudgets. I certainly wasn’t going to be a hitman for the CIA; I’d be damned before I became a promoter of laisser-faire and ‘markets cure all’. And as for the fussbudgets, well… I almost became one. It was only Viereck and his suspicions of the bourgeois bureaucracy who largely held me back from it. As grad school ended, I had a pregnant girlfriend on an expired student visa and no medical insurance. I did the only decent thing: I married her, and I followed her back.

The perpendicularised expatriate

So, there I was. In the birthplace of Lü Bu.

Teaching English to the students of farmers, living in a Soviet-era brutalist apartment complex on the edge of the Gobi Desert in hands-down the strangest boom town I’ve ever experienced, fuelled by a heady mix of rare earths processing and consumer electronics. Listen: it was a place that, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, had come unstuck in time.

Sinicised ethnic Mongolians from Yuan-era families answered to English names in my classroom as they followed the soap-operatic lives of Korean comic-book characters in their textbooks. Cafeteria-quality pizza and fried chicken were served at fancy cafés with red curtains and lacquer tables, but the good food was served at the street stalls run by people from every other possible part of China. Brand spanking-new hospitals built like skyscrapers dispensed prescriptions for traditional Chinese herbs which, as often as not, worked better than the ‘scientific’ Western remedies. My daughter was happy, bless her. My wife wasn’t, bless her too. We survived mostly because we didn’t drink the damn tap water. I still get otorhinolaryngological infections from my bout with pneumonia there. But China changed me. It’s probably better to say that life changed me, because it kicked my arse. No wonder I turned into a metalhead.

China was a different country where the politics and the philosophies and the assumptions that I’d been raised with didn’t seem to apply in the same ways. I suddenly found myself with this very odd, very fierce conviction that China was screwing up, but she should be allowed to screw up in her own way. She shouldn’t have to take dictation from us, we clueless Americans and expats, who didn’t know up from down or left from right, but had still managed to delude ourselves that we knew best. Partly because I myself was so disoriented, and partly because I’m a contrarian and wanted to show myself off as clever, I began defending all of my egalitarian convictions in the language of reactionary high tradition; and my distrust of democratic liberalism with all the revolutionary stridency of Mao Zedong. How was all that supposed to work? Damn if I knew.

The people who made the most sense to me were the ordinary people. My in-laws. My students and their parents. My co-teachers, especially Vivian, whom I’ve mentioned before. China was upside-down, jumbled-up, mish-mashing its most venerable of traditions with the crassest and most gaudy possible approach to development. And yet somehow the people I worked and interacted with at the face-to-face level were sane; they were human, even in the face of these things that should not be. How? Dare I say it? Was this beauty? Was this… hope?

It may seem strange, then, but it really makes a kind of sense to me, that somehow Berdyaev should come back to me in China, smiling wryly beneath his moustache and bringing under his arm copies of Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, War, Progress and the End of History and On Spiritual Unity. Vladimir Solovyov and Aleksei Khomyakov soon joined my list of philosophical influences, and all because of what I beheld in Baotou. Somehow the apophatic spiritual politics of the Slavophils and the apocalyptically-inflected Platonism of Solovyov were able to speak wisdom to me about this perpendicularised public sphere, this orchestrated chaos that was my life – but it was a wisdom that wasn’t their own. And that was how I sought out and found Mitrophan Chin in Boston, who introduced me to Fr Sergiy Voronin at the Russian Embassy in Beijing and… well…

The Heavy Anglo-Orthodox was born out of the chaos. Queue the theme of Lü Bu.

Old faith in the old capital

I moved schools, largely for personal reasons. I became a schoolteacher at a public middle school in Luoyang. My wife was happier: we were within daily reach of her parents, and they helped us so much in raising Ellie I can’t possibly thank them enough. (The elder Chinese wisdom of the multi-generational household is old, and wisdom, for a reason – though I have to admit, at the time I was more than a bit of a freeloader.)

I was left quite a bit to my own devices in following the dictates of my conscience and adapting myself to the faith that had suddenly visited me. Mostly, those dictates involved watching terrible B-movies and playing Smash Bros. with my next-door neighbour and best friend in Luoyang. I got good at playing several characters, but was still most comfortable with Marth. I took on a prayer rule. I fasted. And I read Russian Orthodox authors. Saint Filaret of Moscow; Saint John of Kronstadt; Konstantin Pobedonostsev. I became an insufferable traddie for a little while, and annoyed everyone with the fasting rules I tried so hard to keep. It was not the best of foundations to build on, but I tried my hardest to build on it with what tools I had to hand.

For the time being, I was philosophically stagnant. Philosophy wouldn’t save me; I had to put it aside. I didn’t cease being interested in œconomic or political questions, though – I read some works by Fr Sergey Bulgakov, and also some by my father’s old friend and colleague, the late Dr Jaroslav Vaněk, about the heterodox political œconomy of Yugoslavia, and came away with a newfound interest in gæopolitics wherein I found myself more and more often taking the side of the victims of empire and the resisters of neoliberalism, wherever they happened to be. A rather ironic position to be in, for a Henan nüxu 河南女婿 living in a city of peonies, the very heart of what was for much of human history the most powerful empire in the world. But neoliberal – Henan is not. My father-in-law is a businessman and entrepreneur, but (as I came to learn during my time living with him) he’s got opinions which occasionally range well to the left of my own on questions of œconomy and gæopolitics.

My son Albert was born in Henan, same as his sister Ellie. I got to see him and hold him for a couple of weeks before I had to return to the United States, which I did in advance of my wife.

Homeward bound

I returned home in the middle of 2015 and began looking for work. This would begin one of my long stretches of unemployment where it was pressed firmly home to me, just how little I’d learnt from graduate school these seemingly all-important lessons about being a self-promoter. (I’m not one.) I attended Saint Mary’s Antiochian, and befriended several people there – one of whom hooked me up with an internship at a policy research group: the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council; later I would get a job at EAB, which is how I ended up in the Twin Cities. I gush about Arabic hospitality, but I really could stand to gush quite a bit more than I do. It is really only owing to the efforts of the wonderful, caring people who worship at Saint Mary’s Antiochian – particularly Fr Elie Estephan and his contacts in the legal world – that my wife is living with me in the United States now, and that we are once again a united family. To him and to the Saint Mary’s family as they prayed for me and supported me both spiritually and materially, I truly owe a lifelong debt.

Intellectually, I sustained myself on history: the history of agrarian movements in Eastern Europe; the history of third-party politics at home. Movements of language, cultures and peoples fascinated me. I became consciously interested in the people living in the margins, at the crossroads, on the borders, between the cracks. The crucified peoples of the world. It became a desire of mine to stand with them and to share their suffering, in however small a degree. I got my wish. Not in the way I would have hoped, but I got it all the same. I was fired. Some bare six months after my family had come here.

Unemployment sucks. Even for someone like me, who understands all the pitfalls of our meritocratic mythology and of Lockean contractarianism, being unemployed feels like a failure of manhood. The literature which could best give voice to my pain was proletarian and immigrant: the novels of Carpatho-Rusin immigrant Thomas Bell, who understood all too well the slow dehumanisation that takes place for the unemployed. The consciousness of being an object of pity. It was through this unemployment period that I came to sympathise far more strongly and in a far more visceral way with the plight of workers. Before, in my Marxist phase, I had considered them only in abstraction. Now I was among them, one of them. Material conditions suddenly mattered a great deal more; when you don’t have money, worrying about anything else seems like a luxury. The working-class Rusins who had come here from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a people truly marginalised and between the cracks, had understood this. They found strength in their faith, but they still organised and fought. And suffered. And died. And those who lived, and were literate, wrote through their suffering. In this writing I found consolation, and a will to fight.

The Platonic machinist

I’m still processing from my year of reading Plato, which began when I was still employed at EAB. Actually, I began reading Plato in part because I felt it necessary to understand the historical reasons behind the rise of a certain political figure. But I found that Plato wasn’t necessarily as interested in history as he was in the same questions that drove Confucius: what is justice? What is the Good? What do these things look like (and act like) in the human being? And he had a way of approaching the question which shook all my certainties and made me feel completely, philosophically inadequate to the task.

I also found that the Plato who wrote and left his Dialogues was a very different Plato than the Plato of the public imagination. The Plato of the public imagination is a great abstracter, a kind of proto-Gnostic – someone more concerned with the realm of the ideal than with the demands of life here and now. But the Plato of the Dialogues was very much this-earthly; he was very much concerned with how we are to behave in the here-and-now, with how we justify ourselves and our actions, with how we deceive ourselves with various approximations of the truth which are not actually the truth. For Plato the Forms are not their own end, but a practical exercise which we use to approach and measure ourselves against the Good. He used a gæometric exercise – that is, he used Forms – to convince Meno’s slave that what he thought he knew wasn’t actually true, and to prompt Meno’s slave to figure out for himself (or rather, to ‘remember’) how to reason for himself toward the truth. Though Plato may have been an élitist, his emphasis on knowing led me to a new appreciation for manual labour. There is no shame in it when I became an hourly wage-earning machine operator here.

I didn’t abandon interest in history, though. In our current gæopolitical mess, I found I had to become interested in China’s Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, in which Chinese thinkers had to grapple with the behaviours and problems of states in an environment of international anarchy. It’s not surprising, given my reading of Jiang Qing, that I would turn to the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals; what did surprise me was how realist it was, in spite of (or maybe because of) its eschatological fixations. It charted a kind of grand-historical ‘fall from grace’, and it drew careful distinctions between what was laudable, what was acceptable, what was possible and what was outright wrong. Only suddenly, at the end, are we treated to a kind of flashing eschatological hope – the arrival of the qilin, a prefiguration of the intrusion of Christ into history.

Dong Zhongshu, the great interpreter of the Gongyang Commentary and the father of an entire philological-hermeneutic tradition that would include He Xiu, Gong Zizhen, Wei Yuan, Lin Zexu, Kang Youwei and Jiang Qing, became another great philosophical influence on me. He took the philosophy of Confucius, and – applying it to history, seeing the outworkings of Tian in the historical records – transmogrified it into an intense, demanding form of personalism, a witness to the Heavenly personality of persons, a personalism which had definite political ramifications. This again brought me back to the personalism of Berdyaev.

The unlikely places

Alien Qazaqs were my dear friends;
Chaotic China my sanity;
Wise Greeks my cloud of unknowing;
New England Arab refugees my anchor;
Stateless Rusins my consolation.

Hatched east of the Mississippi,
Migrant to the seaboard,
My whole life I looked east.
Further and further thence I flew in my search,
Only to roost on the western bank.

I think I’ve done a fairly good run-down here, of where I’ve been the past nine years – and, incidentally, drawn up a decent list of my more important intellectual influences and guiding spirits along the way: Plato, Confucius, Dong Zhongshu, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Ruskin, Karl Marx, Aleksei Khomyakov, Abai Qunanbayuli, Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, George Grant, Wang Hui and Jiang Qing. Gathering up all the fragments, perhaps there is a pattern to be seen there. Or perhaps not. Even if there isn’t a pattern (or rather, better to say, there is a pattern but it is for God’s eyes and not for mine except in the fullness of time), what I’ve seen of life, even the ugliest and hardest parts of it, is still beautiful and still to be cherished.

Despatches from the Xinzuopai in Monthly Review

Wen Tiejun 溫鐵軍

I don’t think I’ve gushed on this blog yet about how awesome Dr Wen Tiejun 溫鐵軍 is. Allow me to do so now. Wen Tiejun, a contemporary and friend of Wang Hui 汪暉 and Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元 and a key voice on the Chinese New Left (or xinzuopai 新左派), has made his name primarily as an activist attempting resuscitate the Rural Reconstruction Movement. A native of Hebei Province, he grew up in a poor farming family and worked as a trucker to support himself before becoming a social worker. His early life experiences and education convinced him of the need to strengthen rural communities, build a coöperative œconomy from the grassroots in the interests of the farmers, and establish food security through œcologically-sustainable methods. He was a vocal and ardent critic of the 1990’s pro-globalisation and neoliberal ‘reforms’ under Jiang Zemin 江澤民, and was dismissed from his teaching position as a result – and only reinstated with the growing realisation under Hu Jintao 胡錦濤 that a more balanced approach to rural development was needed.

Crucial to his thinking were the ‘three rural problems’ (sannong wenti 三農問題), namely: those facing rural agriculture, rural villages and rural persons. He was a critical advocate of Mao Zedong 毛澤東 and held that Mao’s policies, though necessary to retain independence from the capitalist world system, had left rural areas underdeveloped and culturally-weak. Wen’s work has been aimed primarily at achieving sustainable agricultural practices, the independence of rural villages and the collective self-respect and advocacy of China’s rural people; for this he and his students – many of them transplants to the mainland from Hong Kong – have looked to alternative models. Sustainable agriculture in India has been one of these: they’ve drawn inspiration from Gandhi and from the political-educational projects of Kerala Province.

In any event, Wen Tiejun’s (relatively-)recent English-language articles on the Monthly Review, co-authored with his colleagues Dr Lau Kin Chi 劉健芝, Dr Margaret Jade Sit Tsui 薛翠 and Dr Erebus Wong 黃鈺書 are all golden and all worth reading in detail. Here is a list:

• Ecological Civilisation, Indigenous Culture and Rural Reconstruction in China (1 Feb 2012)
• The Rhetoric and Reality of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: A View from China (1 Dec 2016)
• One Belt, One Road: China’s Strategy for a New Global Financial Order (1 Jan 2017)
• The Tyranny of Modern Finance-Capital: A Chinese Perspective (1 Feb 2017)

I’m not going to bore you, gentle readers, with what is sure to be a brief, overly-simplistic and boring synopsis of these four essays. Suffice it to say here that they draw upon a number of interesting sources. Old-school Marxists Immanuel Wallerstein and Samîr Amîn figure very prominently in their understanding of the global scope of the problems facing China’s farmers. But – as indicated above – they do not draw upon solely Marxist sources. The very name of the Rural Reconstruction Movement (a name not all of these scholars accept) is meant to recall the work of the rural reformers during the Republican era. And in contradistinction to the colonial semi-peripheries of Hong Kong and Shanghai, they view the ‘indigenous’ culture of the Chinese inland, of the ‘99%’, as a valuable deposit of knowledge and culture rather than as a blank canvas upon which ‘modernisation’ and ‘industrialisation’ can be painted.

Dr Wen Tiejun himself has invoked the names of Jimmy Yen 晏陽初 and Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 – the ‘progressive intellectuals of the 1920s and ‘30s’ mentioned in his first Monthly Review article – in his establishment of rural advocacy groups, credit unions and educational organisations. His students have also done so in their own work. Jimmy Yen did not claim any denominational affiliation for himself, but in terms of his education, he belonged to that great broad stream of Social Gospel Anglicanism which sustained Richard Tawney, who met with Dr Yen and admired his work on his trip to China. Dr Yen was not deterred from his Christianity even by the ill-treatment he received in Hong Kong at the hands of bigoted white-supremacist Englishmen. Indeed, as head of the Chinese YMCA he spoke of being a follower of Christ. His intellectual formation and friendships with Methodist and Anglican rectors and volunteers including William Aldis, James Stewart and Fletcher Brockman deeply informed his rural activism and belief in mass education. William Aldis in particular was a deep influence on Dr Yen – he was no overbearing proselytiser, and did not preach to the boys under his care, but instead took care to witness to the Gospel by leading a gentle and unobtrusive life.

Liang Shuming, on the other hand, was a Buddhist by religious conviction and a Confucian by philosophical ones; and he combined a deeply conservative – even reactionary – social outlook with certain radical populist demands on the social organisation of rural life. Though he never quite saw eye-to-eye with Mao Zedong (with whom he was intimately related at several points in his career; sometimes in a friendly way and sometimes far less so), he shared with Mao a conviction that China needed a culturally-specific socialist revolution from the rural grassroots in order to stand on its own feet. Unlike Mao, Liang felt this revolution needed to be peaceful and needed to draw from ‘traditional’ sources – in particular the philosophy and group-oriented pædagogical methods of Wang Yangming 王陽明.

Wang Yangming was also a significant influence on the third of the great rural reformers of the Republican Era, Tao Xingzhi 陶行知, who actually took his name from Wang’s works. Tao Xingzhi bridged the Confucian and the Christian worlds; like Dr Yen he was educated at a Christian missionary school. He ended up joining, along with Yen and Liang, the democratic-socialist China Democratic League (Zhongguo Minzhu Tongmeng 中國民主同盟) and, like Liang in particular, Tao was more sympathetic to the Communists than he was to the Nationalists. He sheltered CCP cadres from the Nationalist secret police. He was outraged at the political assassinations of Li Gongpu 李公樸 and Wen Yiduo 聞一多 and declared himself ready to take the ‘third bullet’. Tao dedicated his life to educational reforms, and even though (like Dr Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, his comrade in the CDL) he was proscribed by the Cultural Revolutionaries as a ‘rightist’, he has since been rehabilitated in the ‘official’ histories as a key player in Chinese modernity.

As witnessed in these essays and elsewhere, the advocates of rural regeneration are synthesising and integrating insights borrowed from a wide spectrum of thought. Indeed, the Hongkonger members of ARENA have directed the students of Dr Wen toward Gandhian thought and the left-democratic politics of Kerala in India. The philosophical ‘concentration’ of Dr Wen is specifically political, of course, and it leads in an unmistakeably populist, that is to say narodniy, direction – Dr Jade Sit Tsui works in Chongqing, after all.

But Chinese thought in general needs, and naturally gravitates to, precisely such ‘concentrations’ as those heralded by Liang Shuming and Jimmy Yen. The work of digging up the ‘indigenous’ wisdom of the Chinese inland must be continued and deepened, and not limited merely to the political-philosophical sphere. The work of Dr Shen Jiming 申紀明 (or Gi-ming Shien), a traditional Chinese philosopher who introduced the deep and subtle thought of Laozi 老子 to a certain Fr Seraphim (Rose), inspired precisely such a concentration. Fr Seraphim, and later Hieromonk Damascene, would come to see Laozi as a prophet of the Way, whose Incarnation in the person of Christ he had not yet seen.

Who knows?

One of the complaints that Socrates’ critics – especially the elder Athenian statesmen and Sophists, and this is particularly significant – had of him was that he was constantly carrying on about ‘shoemakers and carpenters and smiths’. This was particularly true of the tyrant Critias, who has a half-dozen ready answers to the question Socrates asks him about moderation in the Charmides. This looks like knowledge of truth, of course – but it isn’t. Critias understands enough of rhetoric to appear as though he has gnōsis, but he doesn’t actually have it. Which is particularly frustrating coming off the end of that first tetralogy of Plato’s, where all he does is raise aporias which deflate all our readerly pretensions to knowledge. Critias has the answers! we want to cry. Just let him give them to us! But Plato wants us to see and understand, through Socrates’ cross-examination of Critias, the danger in that.

Let me put this another way. Plato is an élitist insofar as he distrusts the wisdom of ‘the many’ and believes the government should be in the hands of the wise and virtuous. But his élitism is often badly caricatured by his late-coming readers. He is by no means an apologist for the wealthy or propertied, for the status quo. He is actually most eager to deflate the public intellectuals of his day, the Sophists and their students, the ‘serious men’ of the Athenian ship of state – the sort whom Alcibiades was wont to be wooed by. He raises the questions among the statesmen like Critias. He goes to the ‘wisest’ and ‘worthiest’ teachers of the men of means he can find: Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias and Polus. Each time he leaves mostly unsatisfied, in the dark, more confused than before.

So where does Socrates go to find the truth? Well, ultimately, he dies for it. He goes to trial before the Athenians and is judged for his doubts about democracy and about the gods, for corrupting the youth – but most of all, for making the intelligent and ‘serious men’ (the Friedmans and Krugmans, the Pinkers and Chaits, the Coateses and Fukuyamas of his time) look like the fools they truly were. For Plato, the first glimpse we get of the truly true and the really real – the nous bending itself to ‘remember’ some kind of formal wisdom which transcends it – is actually in the Meno. But it’s not Meno himself who utters it! It’s not Meno who experiences metanoia. It’s Meno’s slave!

This is an important point, and these reflections are actually thanks to Rebecca Bratten Weiss and her excellent take on the ‘Western canon’. She points out, with no small degree of well-intentioned mischief, that Plato delighted in subverting the expectations of his audience. She cites Plato’s Symposium and how it’s the voice of Diotima ‘breaking in on the sausage party’ to deliver the most convincing of the tributes to erōs. Or when Socrates uses a scandalously feminine analogy for himself, likening himself to a midwife in the Theætetus (and, by extension, his male students to mothers of thought). So when we see Meno’s slave committing and then correcting – by and from himself – a mathematical error in calculating the area of a square, it must be taken both symbolically (that in Meno the ‘noetic’ faculty is enslaved to the will and to the animal ‘mind’), but also literally. For Plato, the philosopher can come from anywhere. The philosopher might even be a cobbler or a smith or a carpenter. Or a foreigner or a woman or a slave.

In the Apology, Socrates lambastes, each in their turn, the statesmen, the sophists, and then the poets, and then the common workmen of Athens. The statesman earns the harshest and most absolute of rebukes, the full brunt of Socrates’ mockery, followed by the sophist, whose pretensions to philosophical wisdom are even higher than the statesman’s. Socrates has a bit more patience with the poets, but he ultimately dismisses what they have to offer of ‘wisdom’ because he finds that they are merely intuiting it rather than knowing; their ‘wisdom’ comes as a kind of irrational ‘genius’ or ‘inspiration’, and the Muses may bestow or take it at their pleasure. It’s actually the working men, the craftsmen, who come off the best in Socrates’ Apology; even though he judges that the artisans ‘fell into the same error as the poets’, at least in this case Plato’s Socrates softens the blow, saying this error is actually based upon a real form of knowledge. A cobbler makes good shoes; a smith makes good pots; a carpenter makes good chairs. Among the Athenians they are the ones closest to the Good, but they don’t yet quite have it. They are removed from the Good as far as a painter is removed from the craft of the material he paints.

Socrates clearly demonstrates the ability of the hoi polloi (like Meno’s slave) to love wisdom, even though this ability is for the most part latent. And yet… Socrates largely speaks with, and attempts to teach, the ‘perilous young men’ of Athens, the privileged sons of the aristocracy. These are the ones he is charged by the Athenian assembly of ‘corrupting’. These are the ones who are – in his view – most in danger of the real corruptions of a Critias (who, you will note, gets very close to the ‘beautiful’ youth Charmides). The ‘élitism’ of Socrates and Plato is one which acknowledges the deep dangers of élite rule! The failures of Socrates – the ones for which he must truly be ‘tried’ – are those in which his students remained strangers to his teaching and flocked instead to the rhetorical promises of the tyrants.

Though I suspect his philosophical sources are more Bergsonian than they are Platonist (and this is certainly a topic I will have to come back to at a later time, given Bergson’s influence on Liang Shuming and the Arab nationalists), Metropolitan Georges Khodr of Byblos and Botrys has this to say: ‘Spiritual discernment does not acquit a person of his own political responsibilities. In order to build the perfect city, it is necessary to handle bricks, stone and steel.’ I must wonder if Plato wouldn’t agree.

When Socrates attempts to lead his two interlocutors toward discerning the nature of justice, and viewing it in ‘large print’ in the ‘city in speech’, Adeimantus begins with the producing class and the question of labour – this is the ‘city of utmost necessity’. Justice does not yet appear in Adeimantus’ necessitarian city of producers, but at the same time, justice cannot appear without it. And when a workable notion of justice finally does appear in the Republic, it is expressly in connexion with work. Justice cannot be done without doing. I have said it before, but once again: it is grossly unfair to Plato to paint him as a pie-in-the-sky idealist or a gnostic who tried to build up a world of pure ratiocination. It’s true that he wanted us to ‘forget the body’ temporarily when considering justice, but he was equally insistent that we can’t forget it forever! And that is why, in the second half of the Republic, Socrates must talk Adeimantus and Glaucon down from their spiritual vision of the Good at the mouth of the cave, shared in silent awe, and back into the cave where they must work to enlighten others. It’s left as an open question whether Glaucon in particular is up to the task.

The ladder of divine ascent

But she that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved.