The uncomfortable King

It’s become something of a piety on the left (including here, on this blog) that Dr Martin Luther King, Jr has become a ‘Santa Clausified’ figure, in the words of Dr Jonathan Walton of Harvard Divinity School: a flag-draped, marble-bound idol of the American civic religion, who in that very transformation found his fundamental message to be effectively neutered. I fully agree there. It’s become a bit of a hobby-horse of mine to retrieve and present the Dr King whose messages were uncomfortable, particularly for the bourgeois white America who has come to see him as its own kind of magic uncle.

Dr King was particularly unsparing in his critique of the ‘white moderates’ in his own day – the people who today would be sporting ‘I’m With Her’ bumper stickers on the backs of their SUVs and listening to NPR while sending their kids to private schools in the safety of gentrified urban and suburban neighbourhoods, and who castigate young people and millennials poorer than themselves as ‘privileged’ and ‘selfish’. (Worthy of note is that Dr King himself never endorsed a single political candidate from either party.) His Letter from a Birmingham Gaol had this to say about the white liberals of his day, the people who made expediency and strategy, law and procedure, the measures of justice itself rather than the other way around:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season’…

This is the necessary thing to understand. Dr King’s far-too-overused and -abused soundbite about ‘the arc of the moral universe… bend[ing] toward justice’ was not a blessing that he personally bestowed upon the contemporary liberal creed of Progress which even the ‘white moderates’ held to; moreover, it was far from an assurance to later generations that they could be complacent or forego vigilance against injustice. Nowadays when we hear that quote it has just a soporific effect, and one which would have appalled the Dr King who wrote his Letter from a Birmingham Gaol. He was not a historical determinist, and furthermore, as a personalist he would be profoundly insulted if you were to take that meaning away from this quote.

There are problems with America in 2018 which King had already seen as such in 1968. He would not take kindly to the fact that his warnings on this front have gone so long unheeded. America, still in the brazen grip of capitalism and the iron grip of militarism, once again goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy, to uphold the lie that she was the ‘indispensable nation’. It was the very topic of his impassioned plea to his own countrymen in Beyond Vietnam, a topic on which the great orator and good reverend refused to keep silent:

This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam… Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans…

it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam’. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that ‘America will be’ are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land…

But even if it [this calling] were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls ‘enemy’, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

The Cold War, proxy-war logic that Dr King opposed so firmly in Beyond Vietnam has resurfaced in spots like Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and the Yemen, with some remarkably ugly consequences. The same people who today will be mouthing obsequies and eulogies to Dr King will tomorrow (or even sooner) be going back to repeating the same old State Department and FBI propaganda, treating the Russian people, the ‘enemy’, as non-white and less-than-human. It’s not enough to decry the president’s language, however foul and detestable, in discussing foreigners, when those of us who would never be so gauche as to make such an utterance still harbour these prejudices so tightly within ourselves.

This is not what Dr King himself taught. This is not what Dr King himself did. Dr King sought to visit Russia personally in 1958 (the trip never quite worked out), because he believed – rightly, as it turns out – that his Russian brothers and sisters were complete persons and human beings, that they had souls, and that they had not ever wholly given up on the Christian faith in spite of an atheist dogma being forced on them from above for four long decades previous.

Dr King was never a Russian stooge as the FBI believed, a charge which is now levelled at other people willing to humanise the Russians, like Dr Stephen Cohen. But he had, as my good friend Paul Grenier rightly says today, ‘the courage to converse’. Would that that same courage, that same conviction of the personhood even of our nation’s enemies, were more evident among us now!

And Dr King used the last year of his life to fight for the very same things that the social-democrats in this country are fighting for now (and more!), and are derided as ‘unrealistic’ by our current-day ‘white moderates’ for so doing. Full employment. Living wages. Affordable housing. Land grants for the poor. Martin Luther King, Jr, supported all of these initiatives not because they accorded with the received wisdom of the centrist technocracy. They didn’t – certainly not in his day and age any more than in ours. But he supported them because the demands of justice, of natural law and virtue rightly conceived, were that much weightier.

Repentance is something too often demanded of others and not of ourselves. I look at Dr King’s example and think of the opportunities I missed, myself, to speak on issues of importance, and am left to wonder if my own silence won’t be remembered by my friends in their hours of need. But for all that, I would deeply love to see it, if we could use this Martin Luther King Day to look to the example of one of our few civic, sæcular (and yet very far from sæcular) saints, and use that opportunity to both individually and collectively repent – both of what we have done wrong, and of what right we have left undone in the pursuit of lasting and just peace.

The Wood Beyond the World

Gentle readers of this blog, you are likely all-too-well aware of my abiding love for English Romanticism and all of its representative figures and works – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphælites. You are likely also aware of the deep influences I’ve taken from the literary work of GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers, who represent a later turn in the same tradition. You will also be aware of my deep love for Yugoslavia. And, of course, the increasingly left-wing bent of my politics will be no surprise to you.

Thus, naturally, the name of William Morris has not gone unmentioned here. His intimate connexion with John Ruskin; his socialism, anti-war activism and pro-Russian, pro-Yugoslav geopolitics; and his literary and artistic influence on all of the later authors listed above; all of these are well known to me. He’s probably better-known in the United States for his influence on the Roycroft community in East Aurora, upstate New York, and thereby also on the American Craftsman and early Modernist style of Frank Lloyd Wright. Given that I’ve heard so much of him and that my worldview, interests and even politics overlap so much with his, it seems I’ve been sorely remiss in leaving his books on my shelf so long unread.

The Wood Beyond the World is one such of Morris’s ‘prose romances’, styled after mediaeval tales and involving touches of the supernatural in its storytelling, that were so influential on Tolkien and Lewis. Morris’s language is deliberately antiquarian and uses a number of Old English archæisms, which can make reading The Wood Beyond the World rather daunting, but if you can get past the forbidding elder-Teutonic portentousness of his prose, one can see fairly easily just why Lewis and Tolkien loved his fiction so much.

Wood is the story of Walter, the son of well-to-do merchant Bartholomew Golding in the port town of Langton-on-Holm. Being young and somewhat foolish, Walter marries a pretty girl from the Redding family who turns out to have a venomous and unfaithful character. Walter seeks to divorce her quietly so as not to provoke a feud between the families (a move which sadly fails), and travel by boat to another city. At the docks, he catches a glimpse of three people: an evil-looking dwarf, a sad-looking girl, and a beautiful lady, whose image haunts him terribly. A series of misfortunes befall him at sea, and he gets the news that his father has been killed by his wife's family. On his way back to avenge himself on the Reddings, and he and his captain and crew are storm-blown to a strange land where only one inhabitant, an old man, lives. This old man tries to warn Walter away from exploring a certain pass, but—what do you think?—he does so anyway.

Walter is drawn into the vicious web of the beautiful lady who appeared to him, who turns out to be an evil sorceress with a taste for pretty young men (until she gets bored with them), worshipped by the bear-men as a goddess. He befriends the girl he saw following her, and together they make a plan to escape the enchanted house and woods which she rules, as well as the bear-folk who worship her.

This plot can be somewhat difficult to follow, again, on account of the antiquarian language. It can take a while to get into the story, but once you do, it is a very good read. The plot is brisk, the characters are well-drawn and colourful, and the intrigues and digressions are well put-together. This is probably not coincidental, given William Morris’s and Shota Rustaveli’s shared interest in Persian literature, but at certain points Wood reminded me of the Georgian Golden Age verse epic Man in the Panther’s Skin. Obviously, the two works share a genre, both being chivalric romances, and thus there are some conventional and tropic similarities. But the two of them both have a tinge of the exotic and a willingness to dabble in supernatural explanations. Walter’s character in particular has shades of Avtandil, a brave warrior who is nonetheless somewhat willing to engage in deceit and strategems to achieve his goals and save his beloved Maid.

In spite of these similarities, the character of the story is very English, coloured by a Blakean Romanticism and a longing for an older order, including even possibly its pieties and superstitions. But it is still very much a work of speculative fiction, with certain magical rules which attain in his version of Elfhame and some fine creative effort put into describing the fictional societies of the bear-folk and the people of Stark-wall. By the end of the story, you come to appreciate even the archaic affectations of the language, which lend the account of the journey of Walter and the Maid such an epic flavour.

This is one of those stories that I wish I’d come across much earlier in my fantasy-fandom, alongside Tolkien and Chaucer and Malory, and of course I’m quite glad I read this ‘prose romance’, both because it is culturally important and for its own merits as a story. Personally I’m looking forward greatly to delving further into Morris’s work.

Tragic hamartia in the Three Kingdoms

The Peach Garden Oath 桃園三結義

The first work of Chinese literature which I read in the original Chinese – albeit with the help of an English translation ready – was the Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Ming novelist Luo Guanzhong: a sprawling historical epic which illustrates the fall of the Han Dynasty, the splintering of China into the eponymous kingdoms, and its reunification under the Sima family, the straight-laced Confucian-gentry founders of the Jin Dynasty. Apart from being a masterwork of literature in its own right, with a vast and colourful array of characters, it has been the inspiration for countless poems, operatic works, television serials, movies and video games.

More importantly, though, what made Luo’s work a classic of Chinese fiction is how deeply it considered the arts of strategy and deception, the psychology of leadership, the warping effects of power and libido dominandi on human character, the tragic and cyclical nature of Chinese history, and the interplay between Confucian ideals of rulership and the grim realities that necessitate martial trickery and Legalist sleight-of-hand. Luo Guanzhong is also responsible for compiling another great Chinese novel, Water Margin, and the two works together are summarised in a famous saying: 「少不讀水庫，老不讀三國。」 ‘Young men shouldn’t read Water Margin, and old men shouldn’t read Three Kingdoms.’ The implication is that the social rebellion and private vengeance so prominent in the former would be harmful to the upbringing of the young; and that the scheming, military trickery and political manipulation in the latter would be harmful to the character of the old.

The basic premise is the stuff of which great tragic operas are made – and indeed, have been, many a time. The faltering Han Dynasty (having failed to heed the brilliant New Text scholar He Xiu’s remonstrances about the rise of wealthy landlords and of the eunuchs as a court faction – the latter of whom had him dismissed from office) is crippled by corruption. Meanwhile, in the hinterlands, a Huang-Lao Daoist healer and fortune-teller, Zhang Jue begins foretelling the downfall of the Han Dynasty using portentous readings of natural disasters and attracting a band of followers through his ‘miracles’. These followers, the Huangjin, stage a massive, bloody rebellion against the Han emperor.

The Han Dynasty does not recover from this crippling blow, and is instead beset by further problems: the treason of the Ten Eunuchs and the tyranny of Dong Zhuo, after which the Emperor is relegated to a mere figurehead at the mercy of a successive series of warlords. However, in all of these events, several remarkable men distinguish themselves. Cao Cao, a promising young captain of the guard at Luoyang, serves valiantly in crushing the Huangjin revolt and makes an abortive attempt to assassinate Dong Zhuo. Liu Bei, a kinsman of the Emperor whose mother had fallen on hard times, raises a loyal peasant militia in Hebei to fight the Huangjin – a militia which includes the heroes Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, Liu’s sworn brothers. And the Hangzhou native Sun Jian fights the Huangjin in Henan, and later joins the coalition against Dong Zhuo, during which he allegedly ‘finds’ the Imperial Seal at the bottom of a well in a Henanese village. (More likely, he bumped off some poor bloke who was trying to save the damn thing from falling into Dong Zhuo’s clutches, and took it for himself.)

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms thereon follows, in the main, the power struggles and civil war that embroils these three men and their families, after each of them rises to take territorial control, each of one part of the country. Dong Zhuo’s tyranny is overthrown by his own adopted son Lü Bu at the instigation of a loyal, upright but ill-fated palace maid, leaving Cao Cao in custody of the Han Emperor and in control of the Central Plains. Cao Cao, a better-than-average tactician, ruthless, somewhat paranoid and willing to improvise as the situation demands, defeats and destroys the power base of his rival Yuan Shao in the Chinese north, thus consolidating his power there.

Liu Bei, in the meanwhile, having been an ally of Yuan Shao, flees from Cao Cao and seeks the advice of a precocious scholar-hermit named Zhuge Liang. With Zhuge’s strategic aid, Liu Bei establishes his own Han Dynasty in the rural Chinese southwest, in the territories of Ba and Shu. And the sons of Sun Jian – in particular Sun Quan – exert their overlordship over the Chinese southeast through a tactical alliance with the warlord Yuan Shu, Yuan Shao’s cousin.

The Romance relishes detailing each of the intricate struggles – intrigues, temporary alliances, sneak attacks, espionage and counter-espionage, the use of feigned and real turn-coats and honey-pots – between these three warlords, their advisors and their successors. Luo Guanzhong’s sensibility is a Shakespearean one – though he clearly has a favoured ‘side’ (that of Liu Bei), his understanding of human nature and the exigencies of civil war give his work a tragic cast that even his heroes can’t escape.

Even though Liu Bei and his two sworn brothers are held up as models of heroism, loyalty and righteousness, the Romance’s tragic slant refuses to allow them to stay there. Guan Yu, indeed, comes the closest to being a true stalwart in the martial fashion, but in the end, he is done in by his own overbearing pride, exhausting his forces and alienating his captains, leaving him vulnerable to the advance of the Eastern Wu general Lü Meng. Zhang Fei is also physically brave, but his irascible temper and cruelty to those beneath him antagonise his own subordinates, who assassinate him and defect to Eastern Wu. Liu Bei himself – at least in the novel – is too easily swayed by sentiment, and this allows Sun Quan and his advisers to take advantage of him repeatedly. Liu Bei dies of exhaustion after failing to avenge the deaths of his sworn brothers at the hands of Sun Quan, and his kingdom falls into the hands of his feckless son, Liu Shan – whose rule is sustained only by the support of Zhuge Liang.

Cao Cao, too, is a victim of his own Shakespearean flaw – paranoia. A man of the capital, privy to the intrigues of the eunuchs and corrupt officials like Dong Zhuo, Cao Cao understands that his survival depends on his trusting no one. Again, early on in his career, that trait served him in good stead: it saved him from the wrath of Dong Zhuo after his failed assassination attempt. But Luo’s novel tells a fictional story of Cao Cao’s death: he develops a brain infection that causes him terrible headaches and fever, and thereupon summons the famous doctor Hua Tuo to cure him of it. The doctor recommends that the abscess be removed by opening Cao Cao’s skull, but Cao Cao comes to believe that this procedure is a pretext for Hua Tuo to kill him. (He had been subject to a previous assassination attempt by another doctor, who tried to give him poisoned medicine.) Cao Cao imprisons Hua Tuo, but then succumbs to the brain infection.

The irony is that Liu Bei’s attachment to his sworn brothers, Guan Yu’s charismatic self-assurance, Zhang Fei’s ferociousness and even Cao Cao’s paranoia were all features of their personalities that allowed them to flourish and to achieve political power in the first place, in the anarchic era in which they found themselves. Luo Guanzhong is making a point that is somewhat anti-Machiavellian, in a way that parallels Shakespeare’s treatment of his machiavels: the virtù (rather than virtue, properly speaking) of such individuals may be sufficient for them to wrest power out of a chaotic situation, but not necessarily enough for them to hold onto it. Often the same characteristics and forces of habit that allow for their rise also bring about their tragic downfall.

As to whether the Romance of the Three Kingdoms has any bearing on modern politics, I don’t doubt, of course, that it does. I would assuredly demur from any triumphalist interpretation of the Romance. However, I will readily say this: Luo Guanzhong’s understanding of the Chinese history and politics of that previous era is as deeply coloured by irony as a modern observer’s should be of ours, and (sorry, Chinese nationalists) the human drama of the Romance does indeed have a certain universal appeal.

On Chinese democracy

Chinese rural reconstruction activists, 1935
including James Yen (front, 2^nd from right) and Liang Shuming (front, far left)

And no, I’m not talking about the Guns N’ Roses album.

As long as I’ve been on this blog, I have been a bit hard – okay, very hard – on the advocates for greater degrees of procedural democracy in China. My approach has indeed ranged from the sympathetic to the polemical and violently denunciatory, but my basic scepticism of democratic ideology in China has remained fairly constant. There are good reasons for this. Even if you are more sympathetic to a pro-democratic orientation for China, which most Americans and Western expats indeed are, it is worth remembering that both the history and the present state of democracy in China come with a great deal of irony attached.

Anachronistic attempts to read back proto-democratic values into Chinese social thought and historical figures (particularly Mencius) aside, any serious consideration of the question of democracy in China goes back no further than the work of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao in attempting to reform the Qing Dynasty along constitutional lines. This is an attempt – as readers know – that I am highly sympathetic to, but it is worth noting that Kang Youwei himself baulked at the idea of a republican, revolutionary China and ended his life as a Qing loyalist. The irony should not be lost, gentle readers, that the very same man who introduced the idea of democracy to China himself ended up rejecting it as a political solution to China’s problems. But Kang Youwei was not just one man. And in fact, his ambivalence toward the idea of democratic rule and representative government is typical of the way in which those Chinese reformers who have done the most to advance democracy have approached it. For example, one of Kang Youwei’s devoted followers, Liang Juchuan (father of Liang Shuming), who stood foursquare behind every reform and innovation that could bring self-rule and modern learning to the Chinese people, eventually martyred himself for the memory of the older, humane traditions of the old society.

When Sun Yat-sen came up with his ‘Three Principles of the People’ (one of which was minzhu, or ‘democracy’), he himself acknowledged that certain hard barriers existed which would prevent democracy from taking root in China. Illiteracy was the biggest barrier, and with illiteracy came a lack of political consciousness. Though a number of government figures talked about raising the literacy rate, the man who formulated the most successful plan for mass education was YC James Yen. James Yen was a democrat and a socialist, according to those who knew him well. But even though his work did involve ‘self-rule’ (by which he meant a kind of direct, participatory democracy at the county level), he emphatically eschewed party politics and avoided a too-close relationship with the ruling Guomindang. He was sceptical, even pessimistic, about the ability that democratic politics on a larger scale could have on the ‘rice-roots’, as Pearl Buck called it. Yen believed that political democracy alone would not fix China’s problems: the evils of poverty, ignorance and illness needed to be addressed simultaneously with strenuous grassroots efforts in coöperatives, technological improvements, mass education and public health. And even when it came to democratic politics, Yen advocated for peasants wresting control over their local xian governments away from the bullies and hirelings who often occupied those offices. Party politics and bureaucratic proceduralism were evils best avoided.

Yen’s closest partners in the mass literacy, vocational training and rural reconstruction projects – Liang Shuming and Tao Xingzhi – were even more ambivalent on the subject of procedural democracy than Yen himself was. Liang Shuming in particular was placed in the unenviable position of being a reluctant leader in the China Democratic League, yet one who didn’t even believe in democracy as an ideal. He thought a one-party dictatorship would be necessary for China’s development – but hated to choose between a crude Communist party and a brutal Nationalist one. And Tao Xingzhi himself, an activist disciple of John Dewey and advocate for ‘democratic education’, was still sufficiently neo-Confucian (of the Wang Yangming school) in orientation to urge ‘discipline’ and the need to combat ‘exaggerated democratisation’. He was disgusted in particular by that rarefied understanding of ‘democracy’ that abstracted policy and procedure away from the realities of life for the masses of working poor.

The irony is this: none of the great builders and theorists of democracy in China were democrats tout court, if indeed they could be called democrats at all. And those that professed themselves most ideologically committed to democracy – the followers of Dr Sun in the Guomindang particularly – were all too often the ones that wound up undermining it. Which is what makes it so frustrating attempting to talk about democracy in China today with any level of intelligence.

On the one hand you have the heirs of the old hard left, who are now correctly starting to talk again about the mass line but largely advocating, directly or not, for a praxis of further centralisation and depoliticisation. And on the other hand, you have bourgeois intellectual-yet-idiots like the signatories of Charter 08, neoliberals in œconomics and neocons on foreign affairs, and their equally-bourgeois supporters in the Gangtai and the Haiwai.

The latter talk a good game about ‘rule of law’, about proceduralism, about transparency and human rights – but only ever on the abstract and legalistic level that Tao Xingzhi actively loathed and that James Yen did his level best to avoid. And ultimately, many of the ideological democrats hate, fear and despise the very people whose ‘human rights’ they claim to value. Neither, of course, gets to the heart of the needed third option, though I must confess that my own sympathies lie with the likewise irony-drenched ‘living Maoism’ that occasionally gets closer to the mark that Mao himself missed. The folk memories of the ‘red belt’ of inland China are strong. From my own experience and conversations with folks there, they are not by any means completely misguided or naïve.

So if I have any hope at all for a fair and democratic China, that hope lies in just such deep-red folk memories, and in just such forms of working-class and lower-stratum schoolteacher activism as Yen, Tao and Liang exemplified. I’m not seeing that hope come from elsewhere.

Fragmentary

There’s a reason why I distrust conversion stories and ‘personal journeys’. The dirty secret is that I don’t really have one, though writing one has always been something of a temptation. It’s a strong temptation, this narrative-building. It’s not like I can point to Dante’s Inferno or anything as a catalyst for conversion. Every time I attempt it, in fact, it often feels like I’m being interrogated at a trial. Why should my story be of any interest? Isn’t there a bit of falseness, of self-display, of navel-gazing about the whole damn thing? Of course there is. Even my post attempting to delve into these neuroses of mine was a grand display of self-indulgence pretending not to be (which, of course, is the point).

The truth is this. I could point to long-standing childhood friendships I have with (now-lapsed) Greek Orthodox Christians. I could point to readings I’ve done, with Berdyaev, Bulgakov and Bede being most prominent among them. I could point to places I’ve been. I could point to wise and patient priests who influenced me. I could point to the crucified peoples, the downtrodden poor whom God loves. I could point to my own tenuous family connexions with places important to Orthodoxy. I could point, then, to an Eastern European-ness that might shade into Eurasian-ness. I could point to the Yugoslavia or to the Czechoslovakia in some peripheral degree, and to the ‘Byzantine’ nature of those projects.

And look: all of the foregoing is true, each for a certain valence of ‘true’. But, as you will note, it’s pretty much also all fragmentary. There’s not much of a ‘story’ there that wouldn’t be, at some level, a lie if I tried to tell it in a linear fashion, to make a ‘journey’ out of it, or to interpolate my own will within it. If you asked me to, I probably could pick up each fragment, examine it, and then show how it might have contributed to my catechumenate and chrismation. Retrospection can and will lend new shades of meaning to events and experiences previously ignored. But any attempt to cobble those fragments together on my part into any kind of ‘spiritual journey’ would have a ring of untruth even to my own ear, unless it looked like James Burke’s Connections.

We do live in an age where grand narratives are suspect, sure. But it also happens to be an age of Tumblr, Snapchat and Facebook. By this point, we’re used to carefully curating, arranging and massaging our selves into tailor-made identities that are more or less consumer fashions. And one of the things that has struck me about the Internet-driven market in Orthodox conversion stories seems to be that many of them – not all, but enough to blip on my BS-o-metre – are a shade too sentimental, a hair too Hallmark, a jot too just-so. As it turns out, I haven’t had such neat straight lines to draw even on this blog; and I actually have to wonder if that isn’t for the best. Note that I’m not saying that the people who write such literature aren’t sincere, at a certain valence of ‘sincerity’, or that they aren’t committed Orthodox Christians. But at some level, trying to learn from experience (our own or others’) and make sense of it all is really what we’re all doing anyway, and – pardon the Lewis paraphrase, it comes with the territory – if truth was something easy then it wouldn’t really be true.

One of the things I learned, then unlearned, and continually try to relearn is: it’s okay to show up at church broken – in a literal sense, fragmented – because ultimately that’s how we are. That’s how I first darkened the door of an Orthodox church. That’s how Fr. Valery at the Saint Alexander Nevsky chapel found me. That’s how Jesus Christ knows I still am, and from which I trust He will fix me with whatever small aid I can render Him. And the same applies to whatever story we tell ourselves about ourselves. How did I convert to Orthodoxy? Pfff. Beats me. I’ll let you know when I figure it out. But the answer’s ultimately likely to be Forever Storm or something.

The courage of Pearl

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck

It was the beginning of tenth grade; I was a sophomore at James Madison West High School. Though I had had my suspicions far earlier that there was more to the confluence of radical and conservative politics than I had previously imagined, taking Mr Dreckschmidt’s elective European history class that year went some way toward confirming them. But that was only a small part of my year. I developed an unrequited (as far as I know) crush on a lovely Latina girl named Jasmine who was in the freshman class that year and with whom I shared a gym class. I always have been a bit of a sucker for brown-eyed brunettes in tank tops. I also enrolled in an area studies course because my best friend Eamonn was also taking it. That class happened to be Mr Mjaanes’ course on China, and one of the required readings in that course, one of the five books that materially changed my life, was The Good Earth by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck.

I knew exactly two things about Ms Buck before I read her novel. Firstly, that she was a missionary’s daughter and had spent much of her early life in China. Secondly, that in her old age she had apparently become something of an ill-tempered contrarian – for reasons which were wholly justified. This intelligence was provided me, through my parents, by one of her elderly neighbours in Ithaca, New York. By the time I finished The Good Earth, I knew a third thing: the woman could write a truly fine story. The hook had been baited. The struggles, triumphs, weaknesses and failures of Wang Lung, Buck’s fictional farmer from Anhui Province, were what truly made me a Sinophile – well before Robert Hans van Gulik’s Judge Dee confirmed it.

To tell the truth, I am learning quite a bit more about Ms Buck now, as I’m reading her extended interview with the left-wing mass education activist and rural reconstruction advocate YC James Yen, Tell the People. The people that she wrote about in The Good Earth: the rural poor, and particularly the girls and women she knew among them – among these people were where her heart truly lay, and that fact becomes quite readily apparent in her discussion with Dr Yen. Her later advocacy, on behalf of black and Asian civil rights in America and on behalf of women’s suffrage and œconomic rights, follows naturally from that.

I had not an inkling, though, that Ms Buck was, in addition to all of this, an advocate for the unborn during the late 1960’s. Apparently this was the case, though – and I’m glad I did the research. In 1968 she wrote a foreword to a volume by Robert Cooke entitled ‘Every life is a gift’, within which she made this remarkable statement:

I fear the power of choice over life or death at human hands, I see no human being whom I could ever trust with such power—not myself, not any other. Human wisdom, human integrity are not great enough. Since the fetus is a creature already alive and in the process of development, to kill it is to choose death over life. At what point shall we allow this choice? For me the answer is—at no point, once life has begun.

The humane sensibility which Ms Buck brought to her writing was deeply informed, thoroughly conscientious, and permeated every aspect of her public life. There was no disconnect between her membership in the National Urban League, her rôle as founder of the East and West Association, her long fight for the acceptance of interracial relationships and adoption, and her defence of children born with severe developmental problems and disabilities. Sadly, the modern-day pro-life movement, governed as it is by a suspicion (to put it mildly) of anything smacking of leftism, would likely disown her for many of these stances. In her own day, she spoke out against war, imperialism and the bomb; and she denounced Winston Churchill for his Russophobia. In so doing she incurred the enmity and suspicion of the FBI for suspected communist sympathies – a notable irony, given her infamy among communists across the ocean. The same sympathies for the ordinary Russian worker that allowed her to speak against Churchill were, after all, exercised also on behalf of the victims of the Cultural Revolution. In this, she was remarkably similar to Fei Xiaotong, to Liang Shuming, and indeed to Dr Yen himself – and she felt the pain of her similarly-courageous stand, particularly when thwarted by the government in seeking the right to visit China again in the wake of Nixon’s visit.

I read and appreciated The Good Earth long ago in a youth which seems far away now. It seems a strange thing to come across her work in Tell the People yet again, now that I’m twice the age I was when I first read her better-known novel. But it’s a respect which deepens further on acquaintance.

Œcology as revelation – a meditation for Theophany

I just finished reading Dr Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s 1967 collection of essays, Man and Nature, which discusses – as one might suppose – the current œcological crisis: man’s (and in particular Western man’s) constant urge to dominate and conquer his natural environment; his state of war against that environment; and how that war began, having its roots in the nominalists’ emptying the natural world of all but its measurable, material content. It is a fascinating read in its own right. I have a feeling that Dr Nasr is a bit unduly harsh on the biological sciences and has something of a naïve understanding of evolutionary theory, but his take on the intellectual history of science and on the history of philosophy of science is intriguing. It runs parallel in certain ways to John Milbank’s later history of social theory, and they tend toward the same ends, though they have slightly different reads on the ‘turning point’. In Nasr’s reading, as far as I can tell, it’s William of Ockham, rather than his fellow Franciscan and intellectual rival John Duns Scotus, who plays the primary rôle in sparking off the materialist turn in the approach to nature.

However, this was somewhat beside the point: Nasr’s argument is a plea for Western Christendom – a plea which is answered in part by Milbank and his associated scholars – to rediscover and reappropriate metaphysics, and weave metaphysics back into the spiritual disciplines of mainline Christian communities. Only in this way can the relationship between man and nature be repaired, and restored to a state of peace from a state of war. It is particularly interesting to note, however, that Nasr cited Orthodox theology as having stronger and more ‘visible’ links to classical metaphysics – and thus being more amenable to understanding that œcology has a sacred dimension.

As such, it’s understandable that Œcumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is dubbed ‘the Green Patriarch’, even by my fellow Orthodox. This isn’t to say that Vladyka Bart’s advocacy for the environment is an aberration or, worse, sui generis in our religious tradition: he is neither. Indeed, in the present day he is joined, gladly, by Russian churchmen such as Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, who spoke at length on the œcological need to curb our consumption and stifle our urge to conquer nature. And his advocacy was echoed in the Basis of the Social Concept, which not only speaks of an œcological crisis, but also places the onus of that crisis squarely on the shoulders of man, and most importantly understands the crisis as having a spiritual dimension!

The spiritual illumination of the entirety of the created order suffuses Patristic writings. In particular: Saint Irenæus of Lyons, Saint Basil of Cæsarea, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Gregory the Theologian and Saint Maximos the Confessor, are cited by Nasr as religious philosophers whose metaphysical bent led them to an appreciation of the sacred within what we would now call œcology. ‘A single blade of grass,’ writes Saint Basil, as he is quoted by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘is enough to occupy your whole mind as you contemplate the skill that produced it.’

It should not take us aback that Saint Basil adores the created order in the Hexæmeron, in which work the above is far from the only panegyric toward nature. We should not be taken aback either by the affinity Saint Irenæus has for œcology. His theology is not only a populist theology insofar as the deepest truths of Christ’s Gospel are accessible to all alike, regardless of knowledge or social status: that formed only a part of his rationale for attacking the Gnostics of his day. Saint Irenæus refused to countenance the idea, popular in his time, that bodies are dirty and somehow unworthy of gnosis. (No, Plato was not a Gnostic either.) For Irenæus, it is important that human beings are biological creatures of flesh, and that we are saved by Christ’s having taken on our position and essence as just such a biological creature. We human beings partake in the created order, and are subject to the created order, and are saved through the created order by Christ:

And just as a cutting from the vine planted in the ground fructifies in its season, or as a corn of wheat falling into the earth and becoming decomposed, rises with manifold increase by the Spirit of God, who contains all things, and then, through the wisdom of God, serves for the use of men, and having received the Word of God, becomes the Eucharist, which is the body and blood of Christ; so also our bodies, being nourished by it, and deposited in the earth, and suffering decomposition there, shall rise at their appointed time, the Word of God granting them resurrection to the glory of God… (Against Heresies, Book V, Chapter II, Section 3)

And here, too, is Saint Gregory the Theologian, in his twenty-eighth Oration:

Peering in I saw not the nature prime, inviolate, self-apprehended (by “self” I mean the Trinity), the nature as it all abides within the first veil and is hidden by the Cherubim, but as it reaches us at its furthest remove from God, being, so far as I can understand, the grandeur, or as divine David calls it the “majesty” inherent in the created things he has brought forth and governs. All these indications of himself that he has left behind him are God’s “averted figure.” They are, as it were, shadowy reflections of the Sun in water, reflections which display to eyes too weak, because too impotent to gaze at it, the Sun overmastering perception in the purity of its light.

The reason to value and cherish œcology – the created order entire, both living and non-living – is that it is precisely an ‘averted figure’ of the Divine. For Saint Gregory the Theologian, the created order entire, as it exists, is translucent with the light of ultimate Being. In fact, for Saint Gregory, we can understand the Divine in no more expedient way than through œcology, because it would overthrow the senses, to say the least, to look even in the slightest degree on the Divine Himself without mediation through a human, or indeed a non-human created, nature.

This is particularly relevant for Theophany, in which we are shown the Triune nature of the Divine, as mediated by the natural element of water. Indeed, we ought not to wonder at Saint Gregory the Theologian’s use of the language of ‘reflection in water’ to describe the figure of God as it can be understood by us: the Blessing of the Waters that takes place on the Feast of Theophany is just such a reflection, as it commemorates the appearance of the Triune God within the waters of the Jordan, and sanctifies the entirety of the life-giving compound through the appearance of the Holy Spirit within it. Water is a translucent compound – light can pass through small quantities of it without being absorbed or diffracted. In just such a way is all of nature translucent with regard to the Creator if we know how to look. And only by so looking can we overcome the urge to treat nature as so much ‘material capital’ to be acquired, so many ‘resources’ to be depleted, so many ‘phenomena’ to be grasped by the calculating faculty, so much ‘living space’ to be conquered.

The Orthodox view of œcology, as expressed in the Theophany Liturgy most prominently, is not nominalist. We are participants in and members of that Liturgy which blesses the waters and is in turn blessed by them. The natural element is both the medium through which the Trinity is revealed, and itself a participant in that revelation. We are not there as conquerors or capitalists, not as ‘sophisters, œconomists and calculators’. We are coparticipators with the waters, observers and partakers of the revelation unfolding through nature. So too must we tread outside the liturgical setting.