The prokeimenon in the Sixth Tone – let us attend

Apologies for the bad Orthodox pun there. The article published recently by Dylan Levi King in Sixth Tone, on the ‘baizuo 白左’ or ‘white left’ insult amongst Chinese netizens and who uses it, is a much-needed addendum and corrective to the foregoing commentary on the phenomenon. Long story short: in Mr King’s telling, it’s not Chinese Trump fans who are dishing out most of these critiques of the Western ‘white left’. It’s Chinese leftists themselves.

This is why it is so important to remember that, from what data we have, China’s political life runs for many intents and purposes perpendicular to ours. According to the study by Jennifer Pan and Xu Yiqing, China’s left, though it is every bit as hostile to neoliberalism, privatisation, ‘free trade’ and market fundamentalism as the Western left is, is nonetheless well out-of-sync with ‘left’ or ‘liberal’ priorities on a broad array of other issues. Broadly speaking, Chinese leftists tend to emphasise the value of folk medicine and folk beliefs, sexual continence and restraint, traditional gender roles, a strong military presence and cultural distinctiveness. King acknowledges this explicitly: ‘although Liu and his acolytes tend to evince a certain discomfort with hallmarks of Western progressive thought — such as gay marriage and the decriminalization of drug use — they are mostly sympathetic to the struggles of marginalized groups’.

King makes a point in this essay that I have been making for a long while now, which is that China at the grassroots level is a politically- and intellectually-intriguing place – far, far more so than the official media organs or at Western mainstream media would suggest. And the fact that the ‘white left’ is indeed drawing such criticism should not be taken as comfort by the nouvelle nouvelle-droite. There is indeed a certain admiration for Trump among the pro-government groups in China, but he is far from being broadly liked. Even the cautious optimism many of China’s leftists may have felt about Trump’s ‘pragmatism’ where rights-and-democracy talk was concerned, has long since worn off.

More to the point, consider that even left-conservative thinkers like Wang Hui take a historical view that has little in common with the ideological preferences of the nouvelle nouvelle-droite. To give one historical example, in Wang Hui’s view (and, indeed, in the view of many ordinary Chinese people, my wife included), the Korean War – still officially called the Great Movement to Resist America and Aid Korea 抗美援朝運動 – was a justifiable war of defence, undertaken by the Chinese people themselves against an aggressive imperialist power. For their part, the American and European alt-right – if pressed – takes the common view that their nations’ involvement in that war as a valid expression of the national interest, or more moralistically as part of the effort to stop the spread of communist ideology. The irony is that the alt-right often does a fairly good job of accounting for differences in cultural outlook and history in forming political awareness – but that awareness seems to fly straight out a window when they fancy they see a nationalist ally of convenience against globalism. At the very least, it’s irresponsible and an exercise in wishful thinking, to believe (as many alt-right China watchers now seem to) that history and ideology don’t shape the formation of popular opinion in deep ways. As King says, the current outcry against the ‘white left’ is best interpreted as ‘a throwback to earlier movements in Chinese political thought’. Such a view is at least consistent with past experience and with contemporary government preferences.

Guangxi’s brand-new arcology

Remember that classic DOS game by Maxis, SimCity 2000? Unfortunately, its game mechanics may have made it out to be a glorified advertisement for the Laffer Curve and supply-side œconomics, but it did indeed feature some interesting social science-fictional concepts. One of these, a ‘future technology’ which became available as a reward after your city reached a certain threshold of population, was the arcology.

The concept of the arcology itself – a neologistic mishmash of ‘architecture’ and ‘œcology’ – belongs to High Modernism (Frank Lloyd Wright’s utopian Broadacre City has been considered a spiritual forerunner of the arcology concept), but the concept was floated specifically to combat some of the major ills of Modern design – especially the waste and pollution associated with suburbs. In an arcology, the architectural design itself is deployed specifically to increase population density, reduce sprawl, make lived spaces more compact and accessible, and ameliorate or eliminate the harmful impacts of human habitation on the environment. Theorists associated with the arcology include Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller and (most famously) Paolo Soleri.

Arcology as a concept worked its way into dystopian literature and film, also – including William Gibson’s Sprawl series and the Philip K. Dick-derived Blade Runner. SimCity 2000 itself, though, billed the arcology as something of a ‘city within a city’, a ‘futuristic self-contained [city] where a huge population is all contained in one building’. Up until now, though, most ‘arcology’ projects have been experimental high-density developments in existing traditional cities, as opposed to the gigantic, steely, glimmering Blade Runner-esque constructions of the science-fictional imagination, whether utopian or dystopian.

But the government of China is apparently considering building an arcology after the futuristic, utopian model, following the utopian intentions and principles of Wright and Soleri, in the city of Liuzhou, Guangxi Province, designed by Stefano Boeri: plans for this project were unveiled last week. Forest City features buildings which are designed to support greenery, generate its own energy and ultimately reduce air pollution; and it really is meant to be a standalone city. The project will be surrounded by farmland. ‘The Forest City was created as a scalable development following a petal formation. Each petal, which caters to a population of 20,000, can be scaled to include five petals in a single region, forming a flower-like formation centered on communal green space. All buildings would be covered in trees and greenery to help suck tons of carbon out of the atmosphere, pump oxygen into the air, and provide soothing habitat to both humans and native fauna.’ Boeri himself describes his project thus:

What they [Chinese developers] have done until now is simply to continue to add new peripheral environments to their cities. They have created these nightmares – immense metropolitan environments. They have to imagine a new model of city that is not about extending and expanding but a system of small, green cities.

I have to say that I like and approve of the intentions of this project: I’m not a fan of suburban sprawl either, of the air pollution and environmental destruction that inevitably accompanies it, or of the denatured, atomising effect sprawl has on our communities. I approve, as indeed many other conservative urbanists approve, of Boeri’s idea of urban spaces being an intimately-connected network of small, green built spaces. Having lived for three years in China – in two cities where living spaces were contained in six-storey Soviet-looking concrete blocks painted various garish shades of pink, orange and yellow, and severed by multi-lane streets from places of work, making even walking commutes a chore – I must confess that some fresh architectural principles, tending toward compactness and a conviction that ‘small is beautiful’, could do wonders in a number of places. And, of course, this is another thing that will put the already breathtakingly-beautiful and sublime Guangxi Province on the map, and preserve further what makes the province special. At the same time, I think there will be and are particular problems associated with the idea of arcology as China is pursuing it.

The great big glaring question with many new developments in China, of course, is who precisely is going to live there, and how will they be drawn there? China is facing a demographic crisis and has already begun overbuilding in many places – this is a problem Boeri acknowledges, but one which seems to cut against his own project as much as the architectural ‘nightmare’ he seeks to supplant. The second question is: what precisely is wrong with the elder architectural traditions in China, and especially the architecture of the siheyuan? Extended families, even as many as four generations and including more than one ‘nuclear’ family, lived in compact, self-contained urban units centred on a common-use courtyard for centuries before Western architectural principles began to spread, particularly after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911. Could these older principles be adapted to building ‘new urbs’ in China, rather than adopting the possibly overplanned utopianism of the arcology?

China’s unique population, property-use and pollution problems do present opportunities for unique solutions, and it is not a surprise that both the government and private actors would be drawn to ideas like Soleri’s and Boeri’s to confront them. It will certainly be interesting to see what comes of the Forest City of Liuzhou. But perhaps a note of caution and a hint at other alternatives is what China could use at this point.

(In)vested interests

Symbol of despotism or of harmony?

All too sadly for those Orthodox thinkers (Pahman, Jensen, Jenkins et al.) who still labour under the delusion that there is any real daylight between Orthodox social thought and their favoured ideology of libertarianism, their own ideological forebear seems to have disagreed with them quite strongly. Here is John Dalberg-Acton, Baron Acton, on how the Investiture Controversies – themselves traceable back to the ‘reform’ movement which led directly to the Great Schism – provided the basis for an ideology of sæcular liberty. Note carefully how he singles out Byzantium and Moscow, both of which promoted symphonía as the ideal toward which both church and state should strive, as examples of church-state collusion or ‘despotism’, which (in his view) quashed the development of ‘civil liberty’:

The only influence capable of resisting the feudal hierarchy was the ecclesiastical hierarchy; and they came into collision, when the process of feudalism threatened the independence of the Church by subjecting the prelates severally to that form of personal dependence on the kings which was peculiar to the Teutonic state.

To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty. If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king whom it anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism. For the aim of both contending parties was absolute authority. But although liberty was not the end for which they strove, it was the means by which the temporal and the spiritual power called the nations to their aid.

Now, it’s necessary to make some distinctions, and to defend even the historical, Byzantine-Muscovite political œconomy from Acton’s charge of ‘despotism’. A number of Orthodox scholars (including Fr. Stanley Harakas himself, who popularised for an English-speaking Orthodox audience the political ideal of symphonía) do actually consider the concept and its associated practices compatible with a number of different political ‘forms’, up to and including voter engagement with the modern sæcular democracy which was in fact birthed by the Investiture Controversies. Even if sæcularism (defined as either a hostile or an amicable separation of church and state) is not the preferred model in Orthodox political theology, Orthodox social thinking does not forbid or discourage lay believers from political engagement. (We aren’t quite Anabaptists on that score; probably somewhere between the Anabaptists and the postliberal Protestants.)

For example: the Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church explicitly acknowledges and endorses the ideal of symphonía:

The Orthodox tradition has developed an explicit ideal of church-state relations. Since church-state relations are two-way traffic, the above-mentioned ideal could emerge in history only in a state that recognises the Orthodox Church as the greatest people’s shrine, in other words, only in an Orthodox state.

Attempts to work out this form were undertaken in Byzantium, where the principles of church-state relations were expressed in the canons and the laws of the empire and were reflected in patristic writings. In their totality these principles were described as symphony between church and state. It is essentially co-operation, mutual support and mutual responsibility without one’s side intruding into the exclusive domain of the other.

- BSC III.4

However, similarly to Fr. Stanley Harakas, the Russian Orthodox Church takes a broad view of how this ideal works in practice. The Russian Church, in the same breath as it acknowledges symphony as a desirable ideal, disobliges a perfectionist or overly-idealist interpretation in its emphasis on the symphonic relationship between church and state. Indeed, it makes a point of providing practical and constructive guidelines for how the Church and its members should comport themselves in the political life of a non-Orthodox, sæcular or even non-Christian state – as though symphonía were the image of a city-in-speech, the Platonic ideal of the marriage of philosophy (or theology) with politics, and the sundry régimes in their varying degrees of sæcularism, papocæsarism or cæsaropapism are merely distortions of that ideal. Within these régimes the participation of the Orthodox faithful is possible, but perhaps not perfectly so. (Much of sections III and V of the Basis take as their theme the acceptable forms and the limits of Orthodox participation in politics: for example, clergy may vote but may not stand for public office; laity may stand for public office but may not claim to represent the plenitude of the Faith within those offices.) The document is therefore quite realist in a philosophical sense. But the Basis also makes it clear that the hostile separation of Moses from Aaron is something to be lamented.

Even this subtler and more variegated view of the Orthodox Church, though, is one which Baron Acton himself has inverted almost perfectly. The traditional Orthodox view is of church-state cooperation in a state of grace and harmony from which the various other régimes fall short. But for Baron Acton, the various papocæsarist and cæsaropapist struggles between Church and princes become instead the vehicle for progressively greater stages of liberation, culminating in a minimal state and a private religion bereft of substantive public claims on its adherents. Rather than being partners in the protection and salvation of mankind within a fallen reality subject to death, Church and state are for Acton obstacles, shackles to be removed from the individual – and this, indeed, points us back to how the liberal anthropology, broadly considered, substantively differs from the anthropology of the Church. Acton’s vision of the human political condition is one which the Church in its depth has historically never shared and never countenanced. The very tradition itself, going back to the sainted Emperors Constantine and Justinian, stands agonal to and irreconcilable with the libertarian political project.

Allow me one caveat. I am not saying that individual Orthodox people who happen to hold libertarian views, even those who work for the Acton Institute, are by that fact alone dishonest or bad Christians. I am sure – positive, in fact – that there are libertarian Orthodox Christians who are far better at following Christ and far nearer the Kingdom of God than I am. What I am saying, however, is that the ideology of libertarianism, in this case as articulated by Baron Acton, is fundamentally at odds with Orthodox political theology. When we get further into the particulars of libertarian thinking, particularly as it concerns usury, wages and the wealth gap, labour unions and the idea of national or communal sin, the contrast between libertarian and Orthodox social thinking, on levels ranging from deep anthropology to nitty-gritty œconomics, is thrown into even sharper relief.

The theological sources of Kievan Rus’

I’ve recently been reading The Russian Religious Mind, by the great religious historian Gyorgi Petrovich Fedotov. According to him, after the Christianisation of Kievan Rus’, the following books were the most important:

It is not certain whether ancient Russia possessed the whole Bible; there is no copy of the Russian Bible in one manuscript before 1500. All sacred books circulated separately for both liturgical and private use… In Russia, the notion of the Biblical canon, distinguishing strongly between the inspired Holy Scripture and the works of the Fathers, never existed. All religious writings were called sacred and divine if they were not heretical.

The Holy Scriptures, together with the apocrypha were equalled or perhaps surpassed by the lives of the saints in popular favour. The latter afforded religious elevation, moral lessons, even the thrill of romance. Very few Greek legends of saints were not translated or known in Russia. Among the passions of the martyrs the most popular were, naturally, those of the ‘megalomartyrs’, enjoying the solemn veneration of the Church, such as Saint George, Saint Theodore (or rather, the two Saint Theodores), and Saint Demetrius of Salonika. These legends gave birth, later on, to popular songs in honour of these saints…

Among the third category of the Greek saints, that of canonised bishops, no one had such fame or enjoyed such veneration as Saint Nicholas. He became at once Russia’s national saint. His legends were supplemented in Russia by new miracles. Two things in the figure of the saint most impressed them: the superhuman power of miracles, an almost Godlike domination of the elements, and the charitable trend of his heroic activity. Saint Nicholas lives in the imagination of Christendom not as a hero of asceticism, but as a pattern of compassionate love.

After the lives of the saints the next most important subject matter in Russian manuscripts is the vast and vague literature of sermons, admonitions and moral treatises. But this leads us into the field of the Patristics and raises the question of how much of the immense theological library of the Greek Fathers was accessible to the Russians… Very few of the classical works of Greek theology were known in Russia. Most of the translations pursued merely practical and edifying aims…

A selection of sermons from Gregory of Nazianzus represented for the Russians the summit of Greek theological thought. The sermons were saturated with high dogmatic ideas construed upon Platonic metaphysical background. Unfortunately, they were translated in Bulgaria in such an involved style, word for word, that they were hardly understandable without the Greek original. Even in Greece they demanded the work of commentators to explain their elevated and highly rhetorical language to the mediæval reader. In Russia they were studied and admired by the most learned men, and difficulties occurring in them provoked disputes among the readers. One of the Byzantine exegetes [of Gregory], Nicetas, was translated as well.

For general summaries of Christian doctrine the Russians could use two expositions, one of the earliest and one of the latest summaries of Greek theology: The Catechetical Sermons of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century and the Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by Saint John of Damascus in the eighth century. The latter work was translated only in an abridged form, with the exclusion of many philosophical and dogmatic developments. These two works were, by themselves, sufficient for an introduction into Orthodox dogma. Unhappily, they did not belong to the popular writings in Russia. Practically none of the Latin Fathers were known in Russia or in Greece either…

There were, however, among the ancient Fathers, two men whose spirit deeply influenced Russian Christianity. It can be said that these two men represented for the Russian people the whole Patristic tradition. They were John Chrysostom and Ephrem the Syrian. More than two hundred sermons of Chrysostom were spread in pre-Mongolian Russia, in manifold editions, partly united in collections under different titles: Chrysostom, Golden Stream, and Margarite. The selected sermons of Saint Ephrem bore the Greek name of Parænesis which was interpreted in the Slavonic text as ‘parable, comfort, prayer, instruction’. What is common to both authors is their practical, moral purpose combined with high impressive eloquence. Ephrem the Syrian was a poet in the true sense of the word. Even the double translation into Greek and Slavonic could not efface his artistic spirit.

In content and inspiration the two authors were very different. Chrysostom, through his brilliant Hellenistic rhetoric led directly to the Gospel and dwelt not upon its symbolic-mystical but upon its ethico-religious meaning. He was the teacher of agape, of caritative love, especially of the social aspect of it, defender of the poor, and an inveigher against the rich. A courageous prophetic spirit emanated from his writing as well as his whole personality. In spite of his moral severity he represented the bright side of Christianity, the joy and hope of redemption.

The Syrian poet, whose language was imbued with Biblical lyricism, struck another chord: he was a prophet of repentance. His predominant attitude was the contemplation of the sin and death reigning in the world. With prophetic power and artistic vision he pointed to the final coming of the Lord and His Terrible Judgement. His tone was dark compared to the brighter Chrysostom. But this darkness was saturated with emotionalism and warmed by tears. The Russian people have never abandoned these first two teachers of their Christianity, their spiritual leaders through a thousand years. Russian legends tell about two celestial birds singing in Paradise; Sirin and Alconost, the bird of Joy and that of Sorrow. They could well be an emblem of the two poet-preachers: Saint John and Saint Ephrem…

With these great names the Russian Patristic library was by no means exhausted. Its main content was not that of books, in the modern sense of separate literary works. There was a large mass of anonymous writings often circulating under false authorship, of fragments and even simple sentences whose attributions are a puzzle for literary criticism. Among this heterogeneous material one finds exegetic commentaries (particularly to Psalms), and sermons on feast and fast days of the Calendar. Under the names of ancient Fathers, Saint John, Gregory or Cyril, some later Byzantine homilists found, in this disguise, their way into the Russian Church. The remainder was a formless mass of so-called articles or chapters of various contents, which fills the Slavonic Collections…

As a result of this brief survey, we can draw some conclusions. At first the main bulk of the translated literature belonged to the Christian antiquity of the fourth and fifth centuries. The purely Byzantine theological and mystical tradition was rather weak, but the overwhelming mass of this literature pursued practical, moral and ascetical aims. Beyond the practical sphere, religious needs were satisfied more by apocrypha than by works of dogmatic theology.

This is an interesting overview of the resources available to Kievan Rus’, and it’s worth noting that this corpus of Orthodox spiritual writings is fairly limited. One real religious philosopher (Gregory of Nazianzus), two catechists (Cyril of Jerusalem and John of Damascus), two preachers (John Chrysostom and Ephrem the Syrian) and a ‘formless’, variegated literature of hagiographies, chronology, sayings and aphorisms, apocalyptic literature.

As you can read, gentle reader, Fedotov states all this fairly matter-of-fact. But it’s still impressive that such a limited exposure to the depths of Greek theology, coming from a handful (admittedly, of the greatest) intellectual and spiritual luminaries of the Eastern Roman Empire, could preside over a veritable explosion of religious feeling that sustained the religious culture of the Kievan Rus’ and its offspring principalities for the better part of four centuries. Profusions of liturgical creativity, a great wealth of inspired holy people and martyrs, the creation of a radically-humane legal structure.

It’s more than a bit awe-inspiring. And these great saints of the Church have it very much to their credit!

From left to right: Ss. Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, John of Damascus, and Ephrem the Syrian

Agrarianism is not nativism

The programme [of the Republican Party of Farmers and Peasants]… stated that ‘rough nationalism is foreign’ to the Czechs and Slovaks and called for strong links with Rusins, all the minorities in the republic, Czech and Slovak minorities abroad, ‘colonies’ in the New World, the Sorbs and all other Slavs.

- Daniel Miller, Forging Political Compromise, describing the views of Antonín Švehla and the programme of the agrarian party in Czechoslovakia

I am neither a Bulgarian nor a Serb; I am a Yugoslav!

- Aleksandŭr Stamboliyski, leader of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union

Insofar as the agrarian, distributist, populist movements of early 20^th century Eastern Europe were devoted to opposing both liberalism and communism, and insofar as they were devoted to recovering a rooted, peasant-oriented traditionalism, to that very degree the agrarian parties were able to resist the intellectual and electoral temptations of nativism and ethnic chauvinism. True, they embraced authoritarianism at times as it became necessary, and agrarian governments did get involved in border disputes. But the agrarians, God keep them always near His heart, were neither romantics nor intégristes. Indeed, the fascists found, almost uniformly, that they could not woo the peasantry which the Green Rising had radicalised, merely with appeals to race, blood and soil. The solution they reached for, just as the Bolsheviks had ten years before, was the truncheon and the gun.

Madgearu, the primary theorist of the Romanian Peasants’ Party, was murdered by the Iron Guard for his anti-fascist activities. Stamboliyski, quoted above, was tortured and murdered by the Nazi-aligned IMRO. And of course the Czechoslovak Republic was invaded by the Nazis; the agrarian party was outlawed along with all of the socialist ones. Only in places where agrarianism had not strongly taken root – places like the Ukraine, where land reform was shoved aside in favour of bourgeois language politics; or like Croatia, where agrarianism was forced underground by constant repression – did the poisonous weeds of fascism take root among the populace.

This is because the agrarian, distributist, populist movements of Central and Eastern Europe were fighting a battle of their own. Whether through Stamboliyski’s theory of the ‘estates’, or through Švehla’s ‘law of the land’, or through the coöperative theories of Marković or Madgearu, the agrarians were busy attempting to recover a ‘Tory-radical’ politics of the family and of the commons, that understood such a politics in geographical terms. The link of the people to the soil, to the village, was emphasised. The links of blood (considered as an abstract category, that is, rather than direct ties which preserve a family line) and language, both of which are forms of ephæmeral mass politics encouraged by the French Revolution, were downplayed. If the attitudes of the communists were that class matters and those of the volkisch right were that race matters, then the attitude of the agrarians of Eastern Europe was that geography matters.

In effect, just as the royal families of Europe had promoted a kind of traditionalist-conservative cosmopolitanism in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars in an attempt to stave off nationalism and other forms of revolutionary mass politics, so too did the peasants promote a similar sort of regionalism: but this time, one based on the common œconomic interests of the farmers, wherever they were to be found. The Green International, spearheaded particularly by Švehla was a collective, coöperative platform for these agrarian-populist peasant parties to pool resources, gather information, coördinate political initiatives. Unfortunately with the darkening political climate and the nationalist temper of the age, the Green International did not live to see its full flower but was mown down well before its prime. In addition, political figures like Stamboliyski, Švehla and Croatia’s Stjepan Radić were committed, far more so than the more ‘liberal’ parties and to a degree matched only by the socialists, to the regionalist, coöperativist state-building projects of Yugoslavism and Czechoslovakism: both of which are pre-Communist in the same way that the regionalist state-building project of Great Britain is pre-Whig.

Which is what makes the particular pretensions of modern forms of bourgeois nationalist politics to represent any sort of ‘localism’ or ‘subsidiarity’ so truly repulsive and abhorrent. The original agrarian movements which wanted to give land and welfare and political power back to the villages through œconomic reforms and education – these movements did not appeal to language politics or to base ethnic hatreds. On the other hand, unfortunately, many of the modern right-wing ethno-nationalist or intégriste movements in Eastern Europe are seeking to clothe themselves in the rhetoric of religious self-righteousness. Localists nowadays have to be careful not to be deceived by the politics of identity. We can take heart that the original agrarians weren’t.

Remembering Saint Andrei the Prince

Holy and Right-Believing Prince Andrei the God-Loving of Vladimir

So for this Fourth of July, you won’t have to put up with yours truly on this blog grousing cantankerously about the evils of American republicanism, lamenting the fate of the Tories in America, extolling the virtues of monarchy or championing the cause of King George III the way I have done in past years. In fact, I’ll do even better than that: I will be commemorating a great and saintly monarch – one who has a special connexion with the Qazaq people (then known as the Qypchaqs), and one, at that, who paved the way to come for the autocrats of Moscow and Russia.

Andrei the God-Loving, Holy and Right-Believing Prince of Vladimir, was the grandson of Vladimir Monomakh and the son of Yuri Long-Arm by a Qypchaq noblewoman, Mariya Asenqyzy. From his youth he displayed a pious affection for the Church and a keen attention to prayer, and diligently read the Scriptures; he also participated from a young age in Yuri Long-Arm’s military campaigns and demonstrated great bravery. He led many campaigns, both under his father’s rule and in his own, primarily against the Bulghars. But he had that mixture of authority and peaceableness, firmness and fairness, an ability to strike hard when the occasion demanded but also to extend the olive branch, which would also later characterise his saintly royal nephew Aleksandr’s reign. The Chronicles make note of his diplomatic overtures to the other Rus’ princes, and it’s to be expected that his half-Qypchaq ancestry and understanding of that language aided him in making favourable peace agreements with that people as well.

His father Yuri Long-Arm established him in appanage at Vyshgorod near Kiev, but he would not stay there. Vyshgorod was, at the time, host to a wonderworking Constantinopolitan ikon of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, written by the Apostle and Evangelist Luke, but it was taken from the church there in 1155. Saint Andrei followed the ikon as far as he could northward toward his home of Rostov, when the horse leading the procession stopped seven miles south of Vladimir and would not budge any further. According to the chronicler Father Nikolai, the Theotokos appeared to Andrei the God-Loving that night with a scroll in her hand, and told him: ‘I do not want you to take my icon to Rostov, but rather leave it in Vladimir. Build a stone church here in the name of My Nativity.’ Andrei did meekly as he was bidden, and built the church as he was instructed to do.

The Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God

Andrei the God-Loving was a prolific builder of towns, and a great patron of sacred architecture, of a type which bridged Romanesque and Greek styles – indeed, Andrei invited architects from Western Europe to Vladimir to help him design these new churches. Andrei himself commissioned thirty churches, and his contributions to the Russian built landscape were breathtaking enough to send even the relatively-cynical historian of Muscovy, Dr Robert O Crummey, into rapturous panegyrics. I can only defer to his original descriptions of the Vladimir style of architecture, to which Saint Andrei devoted so much of his attention:

The architecture of Vladimir has qualities all its own. Its builders had a fine sense of proportion and their choice of building material, soft white stone, allowed them to decorate their work with graceful carving. Their most imposing creation is the Cathedral of the Dormition built, beginning in 1158, on a bluff above the Kliazma River. Andrei Bogoliubskii intended the church to be the religious centre of the Vladimir-Suzdal area and the symbol of his political and ecclesiastical independence of Kiev. Originally a large, light building of simple design with three apses and a single cupola, the cathedral took on its present appearance between 1185 and 1189 when it was rebuilt after a fire. At the time, the restorers added two additional aisles, porches and four more cupolas on the corners of the expanded building. The cathedral creates a heavier, more solid impression than it must once have done, but the effect is lightened by the restrained carving – blind arcades and false columns on the façade, the apses, and the supporting drums of the cupolas…

The Church of the Veil on the Nerl river... may well be the most beautiful of all mediæval Russian buildings. Prince Andrei built it in 1165 on an artificial mound above the river flats as a memorial to one of his sons. Even today the little church stands in splendid isolation, visible far across the flat landscape. Its design is extremely simple and the decorative carving restrained. At the same time, there is nothing ordinary about it: the proportions are exceptionally fine and the comparatively high façade with its delicate ornamental columns and the tall cupola combine to give an impression of lightness and grace. The onlooker feels as though lifted up to Heaven. In future generations, Russian builders rarely, if ever, achieved this æthereal effect again.

The Church of the Veil, Bogolyubovo

One story related to his patronage of sacred architecture reveals Andrei’s care for the well-being of the common people. In 1164 he commissioned a Golden Gate, to be built on the road between Kiev and Vladimir, modelled on the gates of Constantinople. A legend relating to this gate has it that as its construction was nearly complete, the gate came crashing down for no reason, burying twelve of the Gate’s workmen alive. The chances of their being rescued was reckoned small. But the princely saint rushed out himself, took the wonderworking ikon of the Holy Theotokos from its place in the church, and brought it to the wreckage site. He knelt before the Theotokos, prayed for the workmen’s deliverance, and personally joined in the search. When the twelve workers were found at last, thanks to the kindly heart of Saint Andrei and the mercies of the Mother of God, all of them were still alive – whole, hale and without serious injury. This incident caused Andrei to dedicate another church to the Holy Theotokos in thanksgiving: the temple of the Deposition of the Virgin’s Robe, which was placed atop the finished Gate. Thus, Saint Andrei inspired great devotion to his rule amongst Vladimir’s common folk. Gyorgi Fedotov, the historian of Kievan Rus’, makes note also that Saint Andrei continued the radical Christian tradition of his forebears, of making generous provision of food, drink and warm clothing for the poor and the homeless on every feast day.

But when his blood was up, he could be remarkably unforgiving. After an ecclesiastical dispute between Vladimir and Kiev which was resolved by the intervention of Constantinople in Kiev’s favour, Saint Andrew sent his bishop Fedor to submit humbly to Metropolitan Konstantin II of Kiev and offer restitution. Neither was accepted. Men loyal to the Metropolitan of Kiev took Fedor without trial, tortured him mercilessly, cut out his tongue, gouged out his eyes, severed his right hand and drowned him. The comeuppance against Kiev for this outrage was harsh. In 1169 Andrei led an army of Rus’ and Qypchaqs to take Kiev ‘on the shield’: it was to be plundered and burnt, sparing no one. The Qypchaqs in the army did not spare even the churches. The Chronicle records it thus: ‘These misfortunes were for their sins, especially for the outrage perpetuated by the Metropolitan.’ The hubris of Metropolitan Konstantin II irreparably broke both the political and the ecclesiastical power of Kiev. Another campaign led by Saint Andrei, this time to the northwest, was stopped by an intervention of the Theotokos, to whom the people of Novgorod had prayed for deliverance from Andrei’s wrath. Typically of Saint Andrei, however, his anger was quickly soothed. He extended a peace to Novgorod, gladly accepted, on favourable terms.

Saint Andrei had won the hearts of the common folk with his kindness toward them, and his reign was long considered a popular one. But his high-born boyars did not, to say the least, share this high appraisal of his rule. They viewed with alarm the curtailing of their traditional tribal ‘rights’, as Saint Andrei wanted to reform the traditional Rus’-Viking drótt into something more like the vertical organisation of the Qypchaq khaghanate. Twenty of them therefore began to plot his murder, which they carried out treacherously by night. The plotters, having arranged for the sword of Saint Boris which Saint Andrei kept over his bed to be removed, stormed into his bedchamber, dispatched the guards, and stabbed the unarmed Saint Andrei repeatedly. Saint Andrei did make a fight of it; he knocked down one of his assailants and caused him to be killed by his fellow-conspirators’ own blades. And it took the high-born conspirators several attempts to kill him. But a prayer was on his lips as he met his death.

Being lettered and learned, and influenced not only by Byzantium but by his Turkic mother, Saint Andrei’s reign saw a great explosion of liturgical as well as architectural creativity; in this aspect, his reign was very much in line with that of the rest of Kievan Rus’. A holiday commemorating the Protection of the Most Holy Theotokos was introduced into the church calendar, and Saint Andrei himself aided in the writing of the prayers of the Liturgy for the new feast.

In many ways, Holy and Right-Believing Prince Andrei the God-Loving became a template for later Princes of Muscovy and Tsars of Russia. His personality blended elements of authoritarian harshness, notable particularly in his dealings with the boyar class, with an almost narodnik care for the peasantry and the common folk and a rare, genuine, active love of peace. His outlook bridged both ‘Asian’ and ‘European’ worlds in a singular way. The churches he built were in an innovative style which looked far to the West for inspiration, yet they stand as some of the most exquisitely beautiful examples of Russian architecture of any time or place: his great love for the Theotokos and Her Son, Our Lord Christ, is apparent in the design itself. His martyrdom was a violent one, but he met it with the name of Christ upon his tongue. Holy Prince Andrei, pray to God for us!

В мире сем благочестно и праведно пожив, молитвою,
милостынею и благостраданием Богу угодил еси,
сего ради и Бог по убиении твоем прослави тя нетлением и чудесы,
Егоже, святе Андрее, моли сохранити отечество твое и всех людей,
благочестно тебе почитающих.

The Placing of the Robe

The Placing of the Honorable Robe of the Most Holy Mother of God at Blachernæ

O Pure One, full of the grace of God,
you have given your sacred robe as a garment of incorruption to all the faithful,
with it you covered your holy body, O divine protection of all mankind.
We celebrate its enshrinement in Blachernæ with love and we cry aloud with awe:
‘Rejoice, O Virgin, boast of Christians.’