月餅節快樂！

A happy mid-autumn festival to one and all!

I confess I have little worthy of blogging to offer on this occasion, but please feel free to enjoy my folkloric-Chestertonian musings from last year along with your mooncake. Cheers!

‘Rustic’ poetry, simplicity, attraction of the mind

A ritual meeting of young girls and young boys in the state of Zheng

喓喓草蟲、趯趯阜螽
未見君子、憂心忡忡。
亦既見止、亦既覯止、我心則降。

陟彼南山、言采其蕨。
未見君子、憂心惙惙。
亦既見止、亦既覯止、我心則說。

陟彼南山、言采其薇。
未見君子、我心傷悲。
亦既見止、亦既覯止、我心則夷。

The meadow grasshopper chirps
And the hillside grasshopper leaps.
Until I have seen my lord,
My anxious heart is disturbed.
But as soon as I shall see him,
As soon as I shall join him,
My heart will have peace.

I climb that southern hill
There to gather the ferns.
Until I have seen my lord,
My anxious heart is tortured.
But as soon as I shall see him,
As soon as I shall join him,
My heart will be gay.

I climb that southern hill
There to gather the ferns.
Until I have seen my lord,
My heart is troubled and sad.
But as soon as I shall see him,
As soon as I shall join him,
My heart will be soothed.

　 　 - The Odes 《詩經》, Caochong 《草蟲》, Shao and the South 召南 3

爰采唐矣、沬之鄉矣。
云誰之思、美孟姜矣。
期我乎桑中、要我乎上宮、送我乎淇之上矣。

爰采麥矣、沬之北矣。
云誰之思、美孟弋矣。
期我乎桑中、要我乎上宮、送我乎淇之上矣 。

爰采葑矣、沬之東矣。
云誰之思、美孟庸矣。
期我乎桑中、要我乎上宮、送我乎淇之上矣。

Where does one pick the dodder?
In the country of Mei.
Know you of whom I am thinking?
The beautiful Meng Jiang.
She waits for me at Sangzhong;
She yearns for me at Shanggong;
She follows me on the Qi!

Where does one pick the wheat?
On the north side of Mei.
Know you of whom I am thinking?
The beautiful Meng Yi.
She waits for me at Sangzhong;
She yearns for me at Shanggong;
She follows me on the Qi!

Where does one pick the turnip?
On the east side of Mei.
Know you of whom I am thinking?
The beautiful Meng Yong.
She waits for me at Sangzhong;
She yearns for me at Shanggong;
She follows me on the Qi!

　 　 - The Odes 《詩經》, Sangzhong 《桑中》, Airs of Yong 鄘風 4

溱與洧、方渙渙兮。
士與女、方秉蕑兮。
女曰觀乎。
士曰既且。
且往觀乎。
洧之外、洵訏且樂。
維士與女、伊其相謔、贈之以勺藥。

溱與洧、瀏其清矣。
士與女、殷其盈兮。
女曰觀乎。
士曰既且。
且往觀乎。
洧之外、洵訏且樂。
維士與女、伊其將謔、贈之以勺藥。

The Zhen and the Wei
Have overflowed their banks.
The youths and maidens
Come to the orchids.
The girls invite the boys: ‘Suppose we go over?’
And the lads reply: ‘Have we not been?’
‘Even so, yet suppose…’
‘… we go over again.’

For over the Wei,
A fair green-sward lies.
Then the lads and the girls
Take their pleasure together;
And the girls are then given a flower as a token.

The Zhen and the Wei
Are full of clear water.
The lads and the girls
In crowds are assembled.
The girls invite the boys: ‘Suppose we go over?’
And the lads reply: ‘Have we not been?’
‘Even so, yet suppose…’
‘… we go over again.’

For over the Wei,
A fair green-sward lies.
Then the lads and the girls
Take their pleasure together;
And the girls are then given a flower as a token.

　 　 - The Odes 《詩經》, Zhen and Wei 《溱洧》, Airs of Zheng 秦風 21

‘Food and sex – that’s what people want. Shi se xing ye 食色性也.’ That’s what my wife said to me with a laugh – quoting an idiom coined by Gao Buhai 告不害 (one of the zhuzi baijia 諸子百家) in the Mencius, who in turn was paraphrasing the Classic of Rites 《禮記》 – as I told her that I was reading the Granet-Edwards translation of the Classic of Odes 《詩經》. (I left out the part about how I was basically provoked into reading it by the eldest of the theological Hart brothers, the same one who made me a fan of comedian and documentarian Rich Hall.)

Now, this being a translation, I am sensitive that I am pretty much wholly at the mercy of Granet and Edwards – a French sociologist, looking at these poems through an anthropological lens, and his English translator – and their interpretations. The validity of all of what I write below must be tempered by that understanding. But Granet argues, rather convincingly, that the Odes are basically a collection of folk songs; folk songs that describe and speak to the realities of life in the villages and countryside of China in deep antiquity.

Granet – being a good sociologist – draws a number of conclusions from these songs that attempt to paint a vivid portrait of village and country life in China’s deep antiquity. Granet seems given to certain orgiastic flights of fancy that seemingly tell us not so much about ancient Chinese culture as they do a bit more than we need to know about his imagination (a common enough failing among sociologists of a particular Freudian era). But more valuable are his comparisons of archaic rural Chinese betrothal and marriage festivities with the customs of their neighbours: the Yi, the Pubiao and the Hmong. Granet puts forward lively images of bands of young men and young women from different villages (exogamy being strictly upheld) meeting together at a carefully-determined date in springtime, just after the winter thaw, at festivals and fairs held at sacred sites like the confluences of two rivers, a copse or a hillside, giving each other gifts, holding competitions with each other in choral singing, sports and racing, and then pairing off to court each other for the remainder, before the festival ended and they returned to their home villages – to be married off to their chosen partners the following autumn. To my mind there is something very charming in a McTellian way (also) about these images, and that’s probably no accident – the folk tradition being what it is.

From a literary view, these folk songs, even in translation, are simple. They spring forth from a singleness of mind. They contain little by way of characterisation, few metaphors and certainly nothing by way of extended conceits; they rely on repetition, antiphonal structure and rhythm for their power. But they are powerful: touching, indeed in many cases stirring – due in part to their frank directness. They speak to deep needs, desires, passions in the human heart. They are concerned with the stuff of a peasant’s daily life: harvesting, gathering wood, hunting, eating, sleeping, the rise and fall of the rivers, the turn of the seasons. They are concerned even more with courtship and erotic love. The first awkward, halting, sometimes confrontational – but seasonal and heavily ritualised – meetings between boys and girls of different villages. The awakening of desire. The heartaches and anguish of first love and parting. Loneliness. The thrills of the chase and the plight of covert assignations. The dread and sorrow (for a girl) of leaving her parents and siblings for a new village. The bliss of consummation. Heartbreak. Despite the lack of personal details – very few of the characters have names, and even those that do are generic enough to avoid causing scandals for the young folk involved – the Odes speak to something deeply human that are easy for those who have loved to recognise.

These poetic expressions, as you can see from the Yong ode ‘Sangzhong’ which I’ve quoted above, are deeply laden with gæographical and botanical imagery, but there is nothing really symbolic in them; rather, they reflect and amplify the emotions expressed within them. Granet calls these ‘rustic themes’. He says:

It is evident that the odes of the Shih ching frequently contain lively and sparkling descriptions of subjects borrowed from Nature … Sometimes we are shown a tree in the fullness of its vigorous growth, and, when its flowers, fruit, leaves and branches are praised, it seems that a parallel is being drawn between the growth of plants and the awakening of the human heart … the loves of the beasts seem to be the counterpart of those of men. The state of the weather, the thunder, snow, wind, dew, rain and the rainbow, or the crops, the gathering of fruits or herbs also form a frame or an opportunity for the expression of the emotions.

Granet includes in his translation the traditional interpretations of the compilers and scholastic commentators of the Odes, including most importantly Mao Heng 毛亨 and Zhu Xi 朱熹. But he clearly takes issue, often quite disparagingly, with the scholarly hermeneutic they apply to the texts: in the broad strokes, he finds these classicist commentators too eager to twist the simple, innocent expressions of feeling in the Odes into sophisticated satires on the policies of the feudal lords of the various states from which the Odes were collected, or else examples of or warnings against the deterioration of morals and feudal ritual propriety in ill-governed states. The irony, of which Granet appears sensible enough himself, is that Confucius himself would probably agree more with him, Granet, than with his own mediæval followers. From the Analects:

子曰：「詩三百，一言以蔽之，曰『思無邪』。」

The Master said, ‘In the Book of Poetry are three hundred pieces, but the design of them all may be embraced in one sentence: “Having no depraved thoughts”.’

(What a far cry indeed from Zhu Xi’s interpretations, which are so apt to see depraved thoughts and licentiousness at each turn in the Odes!)

But clearly, even though Confucius himself thought some of the Odes to be ‘lewd’ (like those belonging to the state of Zheng), he found certain of them worthy of being kept in this collection – and this has always been something of a puzzlement to the later compilers. As Granet puts it:

The embarrassment of the Chinese tradition is evident. It may be expounded thus: after the Shih ching was used as a theme for exercises in rhetoric, and especially after it had become a classic and a subject of instruction, it was considered desirable to attribute to this educational work a moral value, independent both of the use to which it might be put and of the value which it would have had from the beginning. The odes were used for purposes of instruction and it was imagined that they were composed for that purpose…

But for the moral which was to be inculcated some of the songs seemed too licentious; it was felt that they were not adequately excused by saying that the presentation of vice recalls to virtue—for tradition declared them to be licentious. Fortunately, opinion declared the expurgation of the Shih ching by a Sage, and that made it possible, since, officially, no licentious poems were to be found in the collection, to put forward for most of the poems an interpretation which rid them of all baleful influence by completely setting aside their character as love-songs. But in some instances, this method was defective, and it had to be admitted that a certain number of sensual poems were included in the Shih ching.

Now, from my own perspective, since (as I am not a ‘higher critic’) there is no valid internal reason to doubt the Chinese tradition which holds Confucius to have been the compiler of the Odes, the challenge for Confucians posed by Granet is evident. Why did Confucius, who placed such peculiar emphasis on the importance of the Odes for understanding his teachings (to the point where he would not teach even his relatives who hadn’t read the Odes), include these ‘sensual’ songs? Granet nowhere alludes to this comparative-philosophical point, but I will draw the connexion explicitly. By including the love-songs of Zheng (like ‘Zhen and Wei’ above) in the Odes Confucius poses to Chinese society the same challenges about the nature and purpose of poetry that Socrates poses to the Greeks about Homer’s Achilles in Plato’s Dialogues, particularly the Hippias Minor and the Republic.

The Odes themselves ‘have no depraved thoughts’; so says Confucius in the Analects. But why would he say this when these love-songs – direct, bold, sometimes even ‘indecent’ by the Sage’s own standards – would offend both contemporary and later ritual-moral sensibilities? Granet notes:

No mere declarations and tokens of love sufficed to bind [young lovers’] hearts that demanded nothing less than that complete union which would give them eternal possession of each other. It is not to be wondered at that, in songs in which Chinese commentators see only licentiousness, foreigners find traces of an ancient morality, preferable to the existing one. This is due to the fact that, in the lavish protestations of faithfulness made by the lovers, they see an ancient monogamy. As a matter of fact, from the time of their union in the festival of general harmony the lovers considered themselves bound irrevocably, and their apprehensions and agony gave place to security and peace of mind.

Reflecting on which I would ask, in all seriousness: is it so hard to believe that Confucius himself might have seen the Odes in a similar way as Granet (and the ‘foreigners’ he references) claims to? After all, the Analects are not lacking in praise for simple, direct ceremonies and music (!), particularly those found in elder times, and particularly in comparison with the elaborateness and subtlety of the prevailing ritual norms of his own day. (And he particularly detested toadies with well-kept appearances, insinuating manners, glib tongues and fine, well-honed speeches.)

子曰：「先進於禮樂，野人也；後進於禮樂，君子也。如用之，則吾從先進。」

The Master said, ‘The men of former times in the matters of ceremonies and music were rustics, it is said, while the men of these latter times, in ceremonies and music, are accomplished gentlemen. If I have occasion to use those things, I follow the men of former times.’

　 　 - The Analects 《論語》 11.1

And then there is this instance in which Confucius references the Odes directly, talking about them with his student Bu Zixia 卜子夏:

子夏問曰：「『巧笑倩兮，美目盼兮，素以為絢兮。』何謂也？」子曰：「繪事後素。」曰：「禮後乎？」子曰：「起予者商也！始可與言詩已矣。」

Zi Xia asked, saying, ‘What is the meaning of the passage – “The pretty dimples of her artful smile! The well-defined black and white of her eye! The plain ground for the colours!”?’ The Master said, ‘The business of laying on the colours follows (the preparation of) the plain ground.’ ‘Ceremonies then are a subsequent thing?’ The Master said, ‘It is Shang who can bring out my meaning. Now I can begin to talk about the Odes with him.’

　 　 - The Analects 《論語》 4.8

To what, precisely, did Bu Zixia find the ceremonies (or li 禮) subsequent – that is to say, contingent or dependent upon? The Analects answers this question, too. And note this: the answer carries a direct reference to the Odes:

子曰：「興於詩，立於禮。成於樂。」

The Master said, ‘It is by the Odes that the mind is aroused. It is by the Rules of Propriety that the character is established. It is from Music that the finish is received.’

　 　 - The Analects 《論語》 8.8

The Odes, then, were not meant to ‘establish character’ or to provide ‘finish’ to a student’s education. It appears that Confucius did not mean to use them as a guide to the establishment of good character and good ritual norms in a civilised state (the two of those being suspended in a certain dialectic): that’s what the Book of Rites was for. The Odes, rather, are meant to ‘arouse the mind’ (xing 興 – a term which can also be glossed as ‘interest’, ‘wonder’, ‘excite’, ‘pleasure’; whose gloss of ‘arouse’, interestingly enough, also includes erotic entendres; and which, to me, recalls in particular the Platonic use of aporia). What does Confucius mean for us to be excited by, or to wonder at, in the Odes? I wonder if it is not precisely what foreigners wonder at in them.

We see, after all, a number of things in the Odes, that are the subject of exuberant (though unpolished) expression. The patterns of the seasons. The often-terrifying majesty of thunder, rain, wind and floodwaters. Awe at natural beauty – in lakes, hills, rivers, trees, flowers. Delight in the form of a young woman from a man’s perspective. Delight in the form of a young man from a woman’s perspective. Mystique – half-rejection, exhilarated pursuit, gossip, attraction, flirtatiousness, abandon – in the seasonal meeting of the two sexes, separated by custom, by gæography (exogamy, remember?), by the primoridal order of the cosmos. What is seen in the Odes are man’s erotic – in the full breadth and depth of the term – stirrings upon beholding the face of the Divine. It is in this vein also that a devotee of Confucius in the ‘foreign’ land of Chu, Qu Yuan 屈原, wrote the Chuci 《楚辭》. ‘Shi se xing ye’ is not a dismissal. Confucius talked about the superior man returning to the root. He would have us behold all of this and wonder at man’s condition, wonder at his place in the cosmos. If we do not have a good ‘plain ground’, how can we apply bright colours? If we do not understand and respect the human appetites, how can we possibly understand the need for rites? If we do not look on the human condition and love it, and feel compassion for it, how can we possibly begin to seek to correct that condition in ourselves?

In a certain sense, I am beginning to suspect that Zhuangzi 莊子 had it right – at least partially. Much like Khomyakov and Herzen in Russian intellectual history, Confucius and Laozi 老子 were probably closer to each other in outlook than either of their respective students and schools ever would be afterward in history, despite the efforts of syncretic thinkers like Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 and Wang Bi 王弼 who tried to bridge the two schools of thought. Confucius and Laozi beheld the same human Dao. The two of them shared a certain awe of it. Confucius placed the emphasis on the ‘human’ and followed the Odes. Laozi placed the emphasis on the ‘Dao’ and followed it – out of China. But that is a reflection, perhaps, for another time.

One final thought. If Confucianism is ever going to be made relevant again in an uncertain age such as this, perhaps one of the things that will be demanded of the academic proponents of Confucianism is that they find creative ways to recapture the simplicity and singleness of mind in the Odes, and have us wonder at them.

The piper at the gates of Don?

Huh. The mayor of Sevastopol is now a Pink Floyd fan. Go figure. Of course, former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev is a fan of Deep Purple, so perhaps that shouldn’t be so surprising.

Still: Mr Waters does have a good historical point about Sevastopol and Crimea. Just as he had a point about the Maidan and Yanukovych more generally. Just as he has a point to make about Palestine. Just as he has a point about Syria and the White Helmets. Just as he has a point about our current political leadership class in general. To Roger’s credit, his recent pronouncements are of a piece with a long history of anti-war sentiment expressed both in music and in interviews, compassing the Falklands War, the Yugoslav Wars and the Iraq War, at the very least.

Perhaps it is rare to see a rock star with this kind of consistency? In any event, sir, kudos.

Iov (Kundria) the Venerable of Ugolka

Venerable Iov, the Abbot of Mala Ugolka

Ten years ago today, the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church canonised the holy Carpathian-Rusin Archimandrite Iov, who was the monastic head of the Eparchy of Khust and Vinograd. A gentle monastic under the Soviet authorities, he nevertheless stood fast against incursions by the government, for the traditional rights of Orthodox monasteries and the Church more generally. Many thanks to Fr Edward (Pehanich) for writing the life of this recent saint of Carpathian Rus’, from which I borrow heavily here!

Ivan Georgevich Kundria was born in the small Rusin village of Iza under the (often cruelly oppressive) Habsburg Monarchy, one of eight children in his family. He attended the local public school and graduated in 1920 with a specialisation in agronomy and animal husbandry. (Iza, it should be remembered, was the village where the return of the Rusins to Orthodoxy from Uniatism had begun in earnest, at the behest of priests returning from America who had served under Fr Alexis of Wilkes-Barre.) By the time he graduated, Iza had been integrated with the rest of Transcarpathia into the First Czechoslovak Republic, and young Ivan Georgevich joined the Czechoslovak Army, serving with distinction and loyalty in a unit stationed in Michalovce. Young Ivan saved up some money, and after his term of service, he twice made the journey on foot to Mount Athos, but was refused admission to the Russian Monastery of St Panteleimon there because he did not have the proper paperwork, and the Greek government was at that time legally restricting the number of non-Greeks allowed to live on the holy mountain.

Ivan Kundria attended the school at the Monastery of St Nicholas in his home village and graduated from there with a degree in pastoral theology. He and his brother the Hieromonk Panteleimon (Kundria) pooled everything they had and used it to buy a plot of land in the neighbouring village of Gorodilovo, on which was to be built a monastery consecrated, after the example of the monastery founded by St Sergius of Radonezh, to the Holy Trinity. The funds for the building were provided as a gift from St Panteleimon’s Monastery on Athos, as well as a relic from Greatmartyr Demetrius the Myrr-Streaming of Thessaloniki. The first rector of this monastery was the Venerable Saint Aleksei (Kabalyuk) of blessed memory, from whose loving and patient hands Ivan Kundria received the tonsure and the monastic name of Iov, on 22 December 1938.

Monk Iov’s life at the Holy Trinity Monastery was soon to suffer great sorrow and disruption. The Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, and the Rusin people of Transcarpathia were driven en masse into the Soviet Union. They went in great processions, often preceded by their crosses and icons, along with what few meagre worldly goods they had, piled onto rickety carts. Unknowingly, they were fleeing toward – not a welcoming country of kinsmen, but a ruthless and determined atheist persecutor, the revolutionary Soviet government which had come to power more than twenty years before. Stalin had many of these Carpathian Rusins rounded up, arrested and sent straight on to Siberia when they came over the border from Czechoslovakia and Poland into Russia – and many of them perished en route or died of starvation once they arrived. Those Stalin could conscript for his armies, he did, and Monk Iov (having served in the Czechoslovak Army) was one such conscript.

Monk Iov was sent by the Soviets to the front lines to fight Hitler and the Nazis as an artilleryman in the First Czechoslovak Army Corps under Lieutenant-Colonel (later General) Ludvík Svoboda. As a monk, he was forbidden from shedding blood; when ordered to fire mortars, he would defuse them in secret before loading and firing them so that they could do no harm. It was during his service in the army that he met Archbishop Saint Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky) of Krasnoyarsk; the saintly doctor apparently made quite an impression on the younger Rusin monk, and all the rest of his life Saint Iov kept a photograph of him in his cell in a place of honour, alongside that of Gen Svoboda. For his service in the war, Gen Svoboda honoured him with a position as a Czechoslovak Embassy guard in Moscow – and later was secured pardon from his Siberian sentence by Gen Svoboda and given leave to return to Holy Trinity Monastery.

He was very quickly appointed to the priesthood and later made abbot at Gorodilovo, and served the Liturgy every day with prayerful attention. He set an example of humility, and did the menial work of the monastery alongside his brothers. His spiritual children, both inside and outside the monastery, benefitted greatly from his meek, kindly and merciful disposition, and he was greatly loved by all around him.

Fr Iov’s difficulties continued, however – the Soviets appointed a ‘bishop’, Barlaam, whose mission it was to close and liquidate the monasteries in Transcarpathia; Holy Trinity at Gorodilovo was not exempt – particularly when Fr Iov complained of Barlaam’s tyranny to the Patriarch in Moscow. He was sent from monastery to monastery after that, and in 1962 he ended up in the small Rusin village of Monastyrets (Mala Ugolka or Little Ugolka), at a hram dedicated to Greatmartyr Demetrius of Thessaloniki. Legend had it that Monastyrets was where the disciples of Saint Methodius fled after being forced out of Velehrad by hostile German authorities.

Fr Iov won the hearts of the people of Little Ugolka through an example of hard work, patience and humility that soon earned him the reputation of a starets. He served the Liturgy every day, just as he had at Gorodilovo. He made predictions about the end of Communist rule (that would come to be proven true after his repose), healed the sick, gave spiritual advice to many from peasants to university professors, and especially delighted in match-making for young couples. It is said that no marriage that had been arranged and blessed by him ever ended in divorce. During the 1960s he presided over the consecrations of over thirty temples and monasteries in the Carpathians.

He reposed peacefully on the 28^th of July, 1985, and was soon considered for glorification, as the healing miracles continued even after his death. His relics – his body, Gospel, cross and vestments – were all found to be incorrupt, and smelled of myrrh and incense when they were unearthed. His relics were then placed in honour in the Church of Saint Demetrius at Little Ugolka, the town to which the Soviets had exiled him but which he nonetheless made his home. Holy Father Iov, Venerable Abbot and Wonderworker, pray to Christ our God for us, your unworthy children!

Remembering Sabra and Shatila

On 16 September 1982, about 150 members of a right-wing fascist paramilitary affiliated with the Uniate (Maronite) Phalange in Lebanon, entered the Palestinian refugee camp at Shatila and the Beirut neighbourhood of Sabra with the express blessing of the Israeli Defence Forces. Immediately, they began waging a sadistic, brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing – torture, rape, mutilation, murder – of the Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shia Muslims who lived there. Their victims were mostly women, children and elderly civilians: somewhere between 1,000 and 3,500 innocent people (the exact figure is still unknown, though the higher one is likely) perished at the hands of the Phalange, while the Israeli armed forces watched and did nothing to prevent it. It was the single bloodiest event of the conflict between Israel and the Arab world, and is still remembered as a war crime in which the Israeli and American governments were complicit.

The ostensible reason for this horrific bloodbath was the assassination of the leader of the Phalange, Bachir Gemayel. They believed that a member or sympathiser of the Palestine Liberation Organisation was responsible; however, when the dust cleared the assassin turned out to have been a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party instead. In fact, the actual culprit did not matter. The bloodthirst of the Phalange has roots deeper in history. It is arguable – as William Dalrymple does, for example – that the more fanatical followers of the monothelite heresiarch Marun have been waging war against their neighbours since the Council of Chalcedon. They made the best of the Crusades by acting as native informants for the French, and eventually joining the Catholic Church in 1181 – the first instance of uniatism in Eastern Christian history. There is certainly something more to be written at a later date, for the ease with which Uniate Catholicisms adopt far-right racist and fascist ideologies like that which the Phalange promoted. But in the case of Sabra and Shatila, the ideology was a veneer and a ready excuse to indulge a deeper cultural hatred of the Syrian Arabs and the religious beliefs they represented – both Islamic and Byzantine Christian.

However, what the Phalange did to the Palestinian people in 1982 simply could not have been accomplished without the direct support of the Israeli armed forces, and the duplicity of the Reagan administration in dealing with the Arab leadership. Israel – particularly the Likudniks and the military hard-liners under Ariel Sharon – had been planning an invasion of Lebanon for a long time in order to root out the PLO, and they would have done so anyway even if the Maronites had not offered themselves as accomplices in that action. And when the massacre did occur, the Israeli army used flares to aid the Phalange in its bloody business, and also blocked off all routes leading out of West Beirut and from the Shatila refugee camp so that the Palestinians could not escape. When the Phalangists had finished their work, the Israeli armed forces furnished the bulldozers that allowed them to pile the bodies in mass graves.

Our own government was very far from innocent. The Reagan government had brokered the ceasefire which the Israelis broke when Bachir Gemayel was assassinated. One of the terms of that ceasefire was that Palestinian civilians like those in the Shatila camp and those in Beirut would be protected from violence after a PLO withdrawal. Of course, without the PLO, the Palestinians had no one to guarantee their safety, no one to advocate for them or vouch for them or protect them. They provided the perfect scapegoats for the Phalange – who calculated their massacre in the full knowledge that they wouldn’t face any sort of retribution from the authorities who brokered the ceasefire. The United States would not materially oppose Israeli interests in Lebanon, and certainly not to defend a few camps full of stateless indigents.

I had only just graduated from college when I saw Waltz with Bashir. I actually don’t remember the film all that well – I only remember the newsreel clips of Sabra and Shatila in the aftermath. The blood and the bodies in the streets. The mutilated limbs, the charred flesh, the weeping elderly women. But not only on film – it is a crime still within living memory, and the Palestinians still remember it with sober grief. Palestine must be free, if the innocent human beings murdered at Sabra and Shatila are ever to rest in peace.

EDIT: Today in the OCA we also commemorate the 156 Martyrs of Palestine, Christians of Egypt and the Holy Land who suffered under the persecutions of the pagan Roman Emperor Maximian Galerius in the fourth century AD. For your long-suffering people, O Holy Peleus, Nilus, Zeno, Patermuthius, Elias and your laudable Fellow Sufferers, intercede with Our Lord Christ for their salvation and ours!

Holy Martyr Ludmila of Tetín

Protomartyr Ludmila of Bohemia

Ludmila, Protomartyr of the Czech people and a South Slav by origin, was the wife of Kníže Bořivoj of the Czech lands. Bořivoj, who belonged to the pagan noble Přemyslovci, was baptised along with his wife Ludmila by Holy Father Methodius, Enlightener of the Slavs, in his evangelical mission to that people. Both husband and wife took to their new faith with the zeal of the newly-converted, and began supporting churches and inviting priests to hold Divine Liturgy among the Czechs.

Unfortunately, Bořivoj died in 889, leaving Saint Ludmila a widow at the young age of twenty-eight. Their sons, Spytihněv and Vratislav, succeeded their father to the office of Kníže, and Saint Ludmila assisted them as she could – though the young widow never remarried. Instead she devoted her life to prayer.

Vratislav married a pagan woman named Drahomíra, with whom they had a son who would become a saint in his own right: Martyr-Duke Václav the Good. Saint Ludmila was charged with the young child’s upbringing. She doted on young Václav, and made sure he was provided with a good education, sending him to the church school in Budeč. When Kníže Vratislav died, his wife Drahomíra assumed the regency for her son, who was then still only eight years of age. Drahomíra, jealous of her mother-in-law’s influence over Václav, began influencing the young Kníže to allow pagan practices among the Czech people.

Saint Ludmila objected – vehemently, and Drahomíra seized the opportunity to begin laying plans to have her murdered. When Ludmila retired to her home in the town of Tetín, Drahomíra sent after her two retainers, who burst in on her at home and strangled her with her own veil. Practically at once after the news of how the Martyr Ludmila died spread, she began to be venerated as a saint among Czech Christians. She was buried in the local church at Tetín, but her remains were later translated to the Basilica of St. George in Prague.

Holy Martyr Ludmila is remembered today on the Orthodox New Calendar, along with the Synaxis of Saints of Carpatho-Rus. Among the saints most important to the long-suffering Rusin people, Protomartyr Ludmila is honoured alongside Saints Cyril and Methodius, Holy Prince Rastislav, Martyr-Duke Václav, Venerable Prokop of Sázava, Venerable Moses of Kiev, Venerable Efrem of Novotorzhsk, Holy Father Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, Saint Aleksei of Khust, New Priestmartyr Maksim of Gorlice and New Hieromartyr Gorazd of Prague.

Ludmila, martyr for the True Faith and holy grandmother of the Czech people, pray to Christ our God that the souls of us, your wayward children, may be saved!

O Ludmila, when godly fear entered thy heart,
Thou didst abandon the glory of the world,
And hasten to God the Word.
Thou didst take His yoke on thy flesh,
And shed thy blood in a contest surpassing nature.
O glorious Martyr, entreat Christ our God to grant us His great mercy!

Synaxis of the Saints of Carpathian Ruthenia

The Platonic Tory feminism of Mary Astell

Mary Astell

I have made mention once or twice of Mary Astell on this blog before, but have only seriously engaged with her work recently. In fact, I’m rather glad I did – A Serious Proposal to the Ladies would hardly make as much sense if not regarded in its true Platonic light. I’m also indebted to several other comparisons to her work which I could not have made when I first became aware of Astell’s contributions to Western philosophy.

Mary Astell, whose proposal for a religious retirement for women of all ages desirous of education or spiritual improvement unfortunately fell on the ears of an English male public more inclined to toss cheap wit at it than to take it seriously, was hardly a political radical in her own day. She was certainly a Tory of the old-fashioned make. She believed wholeheartedly in the supremacy of the English crown and was avid in her defence of royal prerogatives. As her Serious Proposal shows, she was a devotee of traditional High Church Anglicanism (complete with its clerical hierarchies, elaborate liturgics and fasting and feasting observances), and even some male readers otherwise sympathetic to her thought her proposal for a ladies’ religious retreat to be something too ‘popish’ and too akin to continental monasticism to be taken seriously. She hated the ‘upstart’ pretensions of the new moneyed class, and saw them as a threat to the ethos and privileges of the elder nobility. And she had that distinctively-Tory detestation of mercantile greed and capitalism that characterised people like Abp William Laud, Fr Jonathan Swift, and the later Dr Samuel Johnson, Robert Southey and Richard Oastler. But the natural comparison which my mind is most wont to make, is that between Mary Astell and Ban Zhao 班昭, the historian, Old Text philologue and advocate of women’s education who wrote her Lessons for Women 《女誡》 during the Later Han Dynasty in China.

Astell’s own advocacy for women’s education in England has a philosophical dimension and a religious one. Philosophically, she draws heavily upon Plato. She makes explicit mention of Socrates and the Socratic method in A Serious Proposal, but more specifically, she appeals to Platonic tradition of ‘forgetting the body’ temporarily, and establishes through such argumentation that the poor state of women’s development in her own day is owing to lack of education rather than a natural or inborn defect. Women are as capable of transcending themselves and their baser passions as men are. She then lays out a plan for the improvement of women’s souls through careful religious education; devotion to God through prayer, fasting and attendance at Church services; and cultivating close friendships with other women engaged in the same disciplines. She also uses an appeal to men that comes straight from the Phædrus. The ‘true lover’ of a woman, she argues, is one who will respect her and encourage the cultivation of her mind, whereas the ‘false lover’ or the ‘non-lover’ is the one who regards only his ‘brutish passions’ toward a woman. The philosophical angle of her argument blends neatly into the religious angle. The woman in her religious retirement is meant to keep her heart fixed upon Christ, like so:

The true end of all our prayers and external observations is to work our minds into a truly Christian temper, to obtain for us the empire of our passions, and to reduce all irregular inclinations that so we may be as like God in purity, charity, and all his imitable excellencies as is consistent with the imperfection of a creature.

The degree to which she disdains ‘wit’, ‘foppery’, external adornments, frivolous entertainments, expensive hobbies and fashions, and the degree to which she calls women instead to a life of contemplation and silence, a life of conquest of the passions (a term she uses more than once), away from bickering with each other and away from being so egregiously and unfairly mistreated and despised by men for their own ignorance (which is no fault of their own), is precisely a measure of the degree to which she is influenced by the elder Christian tradition and seeks after a form of askesis which recalls the work particularly of the Greek Church Fathers. After all, there is nothing more properly English than turning to the classical and post-classical Greeks for a good example. But she is no Puritan, by any stretch of the imagination! (As Sharon Jansen, the editor of the volume I’m currently reading, notes, the Puritans of her day were convinced misogynists from John Knox onward.) She is very much a believer that moral and spiritual regeneration comes out of a long process of contemplation and practice in which the woman’s will must coöperate with the Holy Ghost.

Mary Astell is indeed sensible that her religious retirement would be a temporary accommodation for most women, and she does expect that many of them would go back out into the world and marry. She believes, and argues forthrightly, that women who do so would still be greatly improved by education, and that having a firm religious observance and a mind enlightened by true wisdom would be a service both to her and to her husband, even if her husband is not so religious, well-educated or wise. On the other hand, she makes allowances for women who do not marry, and who choose either to stay among the religious as quasi-monastics, or else to go out into the world and be of service to other women as friends and spiritual advisers. This declaration that women may be independent of men and yet still have good standing within Church and society is where Astell begins showing certain glimmers of a more radical potential, as her later feminist commentators correctly note.

In both of these respects, Astell bears a strong resemblance to Ban Zhao. Ban’s Lessons for Women also hold forth both propositions: both that a well-educated woman makes a better and more virtuous wife, and also that a woman of virtue and education has a deep personal worth in her own right, and not merely as an auxiliary to a husband, a father or sons. In her own personal life as well, Ban Zhao demonstrates this: though she proved her worth as a scholar and historian by helping to compile the Book of Han 《漢書》 that her father Ban Biao 班彪 and brother Ban Gu 班固 had both put their hands to, and though she married and had children as was expected of her by the prevailing morals of the day, she went on in her widowhood to serve as a tutor, advisor and friend to Empress-Dowager Deng Sui 鄧綏. Her intellectual accomplishments and virtue far outweighed the expectations that Han society laid on her. (Insofar as Astell is a good Platonist – and she clearly is! – I dare hope she would not object overmuch to being thus favourably likened to a ‘virtuous pagan’ outside her own tradition.)

Astell can justly be claimed as a feminist, as Perry and Jansen both do, though I demur from the appellation of ‘foremother’ – more on that later. Jansen allies her Serious Proposal to the work of Italian-French proto-feminist Christine de Pizan, who also imagined quasi-sæcular women’s spaces for education and contemplation, and whose Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes had been translated into English a century and a half before. She certainly does not demur from challenging or spare the sensibilities of men who desire to keep women ignorant, or consider women as only ornamentations or outlets for their lust. But her feminism is of a kind that seeks to produce women who are wise and virtuous in the classical sense. She is very insistent that her aim is to better women’s character, and not to make of them cheap counterfeits of the other sex. Later feminists regard her work with a certain degree of ambiguity, as is probably justified.

At the same time – and this is speaking as a male reader, so take this with as many grains of salt as you like – it seems that her politically-conservative, Tory inclinations cannot be divorced easily from her insistence on the ontological, spiritual equality of men and women before God. Astell’s Platonic ‘forgetting the body’ allows her to claim for women a faculty for approaching the Divine – that ‘which is really yourself’ and ‘that particle of divinity within you’ – that requires no reference to men. It also allows her to claim through spiritual concentration a uniquely-feminine genius as a reflection of the Divine, one which is not merely pious and wise in a sexless way, but also ‘sweet’, ‘obliging’ and ‘amiable’. Through such claims Astell finds the means of fighting back the old Aristotelian bigotry that women are deformed men, which was still popular in her own day. And as we can see, Astell’s Platonism is very far from being apolitical; it supports what we may call a spiritual aristocracy in which women can fully partake, through this genius.

In A Serious Proposal one only sees brief flashes and hints of Astell’s anti-democratic, ‘authoritarian’ Tory inclinations – obliquely, her contemptuous references to ‘upstarts’, ‘wits’ and ‘fops’ does carry some sense of it. She is far too focussed here on laying out a complete case for women’s education and spiritual edification in an all-female community. But the implications are there: she has no trust in the ordinary run of men or the women who chase after them, either their spiritual or their practical political judgement. In her eyes, most men are already deformed intellectually by want of self-reflection, and what deformity they castigate women for is of their own making. It is worth wondering how much her monarchism was informed by this distrust of the political judgement of men, and in particular the ‘smart’ gentry set.

Naturally, it’s unfair to attempt to surmise how a long-dead intellectual figure would weigh in on present questions, because the historical and material contexts are so different. But it is not at all unfair to seek to engage them on their own terms. Most of her feminist commentators acknowledge that Astell’s arch-conservative, Christoplatonist feminism is of a decidedly different sort than the feminism we see today, which is true. Personally I reject the idea that we must therefore either set Astell aside as a historical aberration, or see her as merely one ‘step’ in a progression which culminates in modern feminism (hence, my Berdyaevian qualms about the ‘foremother’ language). Both are disservices to Astell as a complete thinker in her own right – her Serious Proposal is indeed worth taking seriously.