Khanya on Orthodox and Third World politics

Pope Theodoros II of Alexandria visiting Good Hope, South Africa
Image courtesy the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria

Please do read Khanya today, gentle readers.

Steve Hayes, all-around great writer, has outdone himself this time and put forth a tour de force essay, ‘Third-World Africa — again!’, laying his finger firmly on the point of a subject that yours truly has generally only succeeded in skirting around. I have attempted to broach this subject in the past, with pieces such as ‘Preaching non-alignment from the pew’ and ‘Meekness and generosity are the way out’, but have never managed the kind of analytical clarity Mr Hayes brings to bear. I mean, of course, Orthodox church politics throwing Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory into a sharp theological relief.

Mr Hayes holds forth boldly that we have one of the Orthodox Churches, Constantinople, directly aligning itself with NATO and the capitalist First World, along with the erstwhile bodies in the Ukraine that had splintered away as well as the Uniates. (Yes, Uniatism is very much aligned with the First World.) The Russian Orthodox Church, aligning itself with the government of Russia, seems to be attempting to resurrect the order associated with the Second World. Meanwhile, the rest of the Orthodox Churches, including Antioch, Alexandria and Serbia, reflecting (broadly) the politics of the Arab world, the African continent and the Little Entente / Non-Aligned project of Yugoslavia respectively, are taking the line that whatever political victories might be gained in a contest between Moscow and Constantinople, they are not worth the price of schism in the rest of the Church. They hold no truck with the political machinations of the Russian state, but if push comes to shove they will side with the established canonical church bodies over the newer political ones, just as Jamâl ‘Abd an-Nâsr and Salâma Mûsâ reluctantly sided with the Soviets more of the time than they sided with the West.

Even more interestingly, Mr Hayes cuts straight through the rhetorical fog of nationalistic quasi-remembrance. In what seems to me to be a direct reproach to the incessant and asinine triumphalist identifications of Poroshenko to Vladimir the Great (which ring of the equally-inane comparisons by American evangelicals of Trump to Kuruš), Steve Hayes instead makes two far less-flattering comparisons. Drawing upon the Anglican background which we share, he likens Poroshenko to Henry VIII; and drawing upon his own experience as a South African he likens Poroshenko to Kaiser Matanzima, who broke away from the Methodist Church, banned Methodists from the country and established his own national Methodist Church in Transkei. He also places the modern history of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the context of Soviet and post-Soviet history, with some rather unsetting parallels in that direction as well.

In the end, Mr Hayes, as he should and as is meet and right, holds with the views the Patriarch of his own Church, His Divine Beatitude Pope Theodoros of Alexandria. He is concerned primarily with the health of the Church in his own country, and is rightly troubled by the brewing threat of a schism between the Orthodox Church’s First and Second Worlds. He notes that these conflicts do not happen in a vacuum, and that the stresses and scandals it will place at the foot of the Church in the less politically-influential places of the Third World will not be insignificant.

Again, having tried to speak on the topic myself, I have little else to add to this excellent piece. Please do take the time to read the entirety of Mr Hayes’s incisive, erudite and (more to the point) wise essay. There is far more to the Orthodox world than Moscow and Constantinople, and we need to be attentive to that wisdom if we are to cure ourselves of the various imperial hangovers.

Guess I’m just a good man. Well, I’m alright.

I used to rag on libertarians a lot on this blog. Ragged on ‘em for perverting Christianity, and faking quotes by Saint John Chrysostom. (By the way: Johnny – not a goldbug.) Ragged on ‘em for likewise misreading Confucius. Ragged on their tea party. Ragged on their running Kansas and Wisconsin into the ground. Ragged on their mooning over moonbeams (oh boy did I ever). Ragged on ‘em for being dangerous utopians. Ragged on ‘em for hollowing out academia and inventing social constructivism. And, of course, I ragged on the bespectacled bow-tied breed for generally being the tweaked ones they are.

Though, it’s kind of hard to do nowadays in a post-liberal era. After all, they have no mass constituency to speak of, and their brand is broadly discredited on the American right. Doesn’t seem too seemly, kicking a fedora-tipper with his very fine hat when he’s down and all. Also, being somewhere on the realist spectrum my own self, I actually do tend to agree with libertarian priorities on foreign policy.

But, while I can sympathise with their independent stand on some issues, the recent endorsements given to the new anti-oxygen Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro by Forbes and the Economist in a sudden irrational wave of Chicago Boys nostalgia recently put me in a somewhat less charitable mood. There are a couple of features of libertarianism that require pointing out and, uh, stabbing. You know, politely. Libertarian theory was, after all, instrumental in conceiving, midwifing and nourishing the current political hellscape that modern-day libertarians now claim, like Dr Frankenstein to his monster, to disown and reject. Now, as a representative sample of the historical policies I talk about, I am going to be focussing on the thought of four major post-war libertarian theorists: Friedman, Hayek, von Mises and Rand. (Don’t like it? Don’t think that’s quite fair to your esoteric pet sub-theory of libertarianism or right-anarchism? 去你媽的。 I’m wise to that motte-and-bailey trick. Besides, your boy David Bernstein claims ‘em all.)


Coups and régime change

Libertarians these days generally aren’t fans of military interventions, colour revolutions and US-supported coups abroad. This is one of the points on which I find libertarian bloggers (like Justin Raimondo), think-tanks (like the Cato Institute) and statesmen (like Ron and Rand Paul) the most admirable. Unfortunately, this is also one of the points on which I find libertarians to be the least credible. There is a long and sordid history of the libertarian principle of ‘free trade’ being pushed on unwilling partners down the barrels of guns. Often as not, people with the Whiggish, classical-liberal views that modern-day libertarians lay claim to had a certain idealist, crusading make-the-world-anew mentality that is nowadays the signature of liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. This was a tough habit to shake as recently as the 1960’s, the 1970’s and even the 1990’s.

Most infamously, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek both supported the CIA-funded military coup in Chile that murdered Salvador Allende, as well as the resulting government. Friedman was personally instrumental in stocking the Chilean military with contractors and advisers that not only led the reforms, but actually carried out the coup. These attachés personally trained and educated by Friedman were inculcated in precisely this kind of crusading belief that American institutions and œconomists had a continental duty to spread the gospel of the free market, by force if necessary. Friedrich Hayek, too, would not only engage in two personal tête-à-têtes with Pinochet, but indeed defended his political accomplishments to Western governments and not merely his œconomic ones. In 1979, Ayn Rand supported Israel’s wars of aggression and conquest against its Arabic neighbours, citing Israel as the ‘advanced, technological, civilized country’ and Arabs as ‘almost totally primitive savages’. Note that she too displays this crusading-idealist mentality: ‘Israel [is] bringing industry, intelligence, and modern technology into their stagnation.’ It’s actually a mite stunning in retrospect how, in the early decades of libertarianism’s intellectual ascent, Murray Rothbard stood almost alone in his principled commitment to non-intervention in foreign affairs!

Unfortunately, the crazy 1970’s do not mark the end of the libertarian enthusiasm for régime change. Both at the time and in retrospect, the libertarian right has supported the civil violence orchestrated by Boris Eltsin and supported by the American military and the CIA. The man hailed by the libertarians at the Cato Institute as Russia’s hero during the 1990’s repeatedly secured his hold over the country, with American help, by force and by fraud. The columnists at Reason magazine indeed might do well to note this historical tidbit as they bellyache about Russia’s subsequent allergic reactions to their ideas. Even today, more modest ‘classical-liberal’ outlets still run interference for America’s interventionist foreign policy: for example, when the Economist magazine attributed Yemeni famine and immiseration not to Saudi bombing and American blockades, but instead to a qat habit.

Now, it is perfectly true that the state machinery by which the American government effected these military coups, interventions and régime changes has, with practice, gotten more and more effective and insidious as time has gone on, and the Washington foreign policy consensus has got no problem making all manner of dastardly use of it. The libertarians who nowadays decry all of this architecture and its aggressive use as creeping government totalitarianism are not wrong to do so, but with almost the sole exception of Rothbard, they were asleep at the wheel while it was still manageable and while they still had a non-marginal degree of influence on government processes. And they missed the boat precisely because the American government was implementing policy prescriptions that they wanted. For now, I’m willing to play nice with the libertarians who walk their talk on foreign matters. In the meanwhile, though, pardon me if I take the present-day libertarian penchant for non-interventionist foreign policy with a grain of salt.


Big money in politics

Libertarians pretty well shot themselves in the foot here. A common line among libertarians is that they endorse ‘capitalism’ but not ‘crony capitalism’. Course, that’s never properly been true because, going back to the days of the first joint-stock company charters and the first stock exchanges, all capitalism has been primarily driven by access to governments and their power. But nowhere is it observably more false than in the oh-so-precious libertarian attitude toward campaign finance.

Libertarians conveniently turn the other way whenever considerations on the corruptions of political power take the form of money. Friedman himself considered the matter a simple one of free speech, with money being equivalent to speech; Hayek’s viewpoint was a bit more pessimistic but he came to the same conclusion: whatever the distortions that private money could introduce into politics, they couldn’t possibly be as detrimental as the applications of political power itself. Ayn Rand, utter sociopath that she was, doubled down on this latter point of Hayek’s and said that the concept of the public interest itself was to blame for corruption, and that any attempts to limit it were doomed to failure as long as altruism existed. Some of the more radical anarcho-capitalists like von Mises are utterly incapable of seeing an intrinsic problem with private ‘gifts’ between private citizens, even if those citizens happen to be in capacities of public trust.

For all pragmatic purposes, then, libertarians line up solidly behind big money on this question. There’s something twistedly admirable about Gary Johnson supporting the Citizens United decision even though it directly hurts his electoral chances and aids the major established parties. For the most part, that’s a strategy that’s worked for pushing libertarian policies within those established parties because – as mentioned above – the data show fairly consistently that the donor class as a whole is the class most favourable to libertarian ideas.

Even so, the donor class are not ideologues, and they aren’t particularly beholden to ideas so much as they are to… well, power interests. So what happens when the political winds shift and the donor class starts pulling in favour of, say, immigration restrictions? Or mass surveillance? Or police militarisation (after all, whose interests are they protecting)? Libertarian ideology taken in its pure form starts working against practical libertarian policy objectives, precisely because that ideology is unable to reckon, on this question, with money equating to power instead of speech.

On a related note: given how insistent ‘classical liberals’ tend to be in their saner moments on the law of unintended consequences, it’s rather fascinating that they ignore that law wholesale when it comes to the policy ramifications of decoupling government funding from programmatic objectives. Of course, most libertarians – Friedman and Hayek in particular – would say that, in an ideal world, the only programmatic objectives of government would be territorial defence and a justice system to enforce contracts. But the problem with basing policy on ideals is that it never works wholly according to the dictates of the ideal.

Now, Friedman and Hayek both claimed themselves apprehensive about the 1981 Reagan tax cuts and the way they were implemented. In the end, those apprehensions didn’t stop Friedman from supporting the tax cuts as they happened, as he himself noted in retrospect in 1999. (Remember that Friedman himself was a key adviser to the Reagan campaign.) But their first instincts were correct. The tax cuts were not tailored to specific programmatic objectives; thus they wound up ballooning government spending and creating shiny new opportunities for private cash to grease public fingers. Polanyi said it best: all capitalism is crony, or goes that way left to its own long enough.


The opioid crisis: Prohibition inverted

What I’m gonna say here isn’t news. I mean, Lin Zexu could have told you this back 175 years ago. But one of the things that our current opioid epidemic has proven to those of us have eyes, is that simply making a market in legal drugs doesn’t reduce the social harms associated with those drugs, and indeed might even create them. It really is a crisis, by the way: we have 115 people overdosing on legal opioids and over 1,000 ER visits caused by opioid abuse every day. A full quarter of patients with legal prescriptions for fentanyl and other synthetic opiate painkillers misuse them, despite the assurances of pharmaceutical companies back in the ‘90’s that such misuses would not occur. There is evidence that legal opioids are a gateway to heroin abuse. Opioid abuse is costing our œconomy something to the tune of $80 billion every year, and creating a spike in violent and property crime.

Libertarians (following all four of their gurus Friedman, Rand, von Mises and Hayek) have fought tooth-and-nail to end the ‘war on drugs’, which they basically see as a spectre of Prohibition. Libertarians love to point to the failed American experiment in banning alcohol, and for good reason. Prohibition really did waste shiploads of cash money enforcing the ban on alcohol; it really did make black markets in alcohol more profitable; it really did turn more ordinary people into criminals; and it really did turn already-criminal profiteers in alcohol more dangerous. As they see it, the ‘war on drugs’ generates similar public waste, retrenches violent crime associated with illegal drugs, and crowds out legal companies who would render a ‘safer’ product if the drugs were legal.

Here’s how it is, though. The libertarians basically got one part of their dearest wish fulfilled back in the Clinton years with these prescription painkillers. Those tidy, shiny, legal, for-profit, tax-paying companies (Johnson & Johnson, Purdue Pharma, Endo) that libertarians all assure us would reduce the social harms associated with consumption of illegal drugs? They lobbied the FDA for the legal right to long-term painkiller prescriptions to patients. And the FDA complied: opium-derived drugs, completely legal. And then – without any prompting from the government – these same pharma companies started encouraging doctors to over-prescribe them. No crime, organised or contrary-wise, had ever been involved in the sale of these synthetic painkillers before their appearance on the Rx counter. No black market existed. But these for-profit companies – which libertarians still basically see as the silver bullet to the drug problem – conjured up a widespread addiction crisis of their very own, complete with all the œconomic and social harms libertarians rightly attribute to the original Prohibition.

Once an addiction problem already exists, getting rid of it is another matter – and there I tend to be more sympathetic to certain libertarian arguments about the ‘War on Drugs’ not working as it should. But clearly legalising all drugs, the way libertarians believe should be done on principle, is not the answer if you’re looking to minimise the harms associated with drug use. And the people most like to say so are the people who suffer from it.


The nudgey dictatorialism of ‘sound œconomic principles’

All the foregoing is just so much pussyfooting around the real heart of the matter. And that’s that libertarianism claims to be a philosophy of liberty, but when it comes to defending its policy preferences, it incessantly retreats to the fiction of ‘sound œconomic principles’ and ‘œconomic laws’. Problem with ‘principles’ and ‘laws’ sound like they’re coming from a hard science (when œconomics is no such thing), is they tend to reduce the human being down to a series of quantifiable desires and consequentialist calculations between them. Twice two is four. Every time.

The libertarian is enough of a true believer in the powers of ratiocination, in the ramifications of the calculation, in the brazen law of commerce, that it won’t occur to them that people could come to some other answer than four. That’s the entire point of Austrian ‘praxeology’, which claims oracular predictive power for itself on the basis of individual-level rational calculation. The ‘œconomic consensus’ around which congealed the rather more amorphous ideological axioms of neoliberalism, however, is not quite so trusting. The newer breed of Chicago Boys share the libertarian faith in the rationality of markets and the brazen law of commerce, but generally don’t trust the rationality of market actors, who have to be… nudged, prodded, incentivised to put down ‘twice two is four’. You don’t have to make laws or threats to get folk to comply; you just have to lay down a path of least resistance.

Now, if these champions of œconomism – even the savvier, more cynical behaviouralist kind – actually read Dostoevsky or other literary students of human nature ‘stead of œcon textbooks, they’d see the problem with that. These ‘œconomic laws’ don’t and can’t account for either the individual or the mass instances of human perversity that’ll hold ‘twice two is five’. And it was just such an instance of mass human perversity that got us into our current political dilemma. As I’ve said, libertarians and neoliberals are not particularly identical in their political outlook, but they both hold to the ironclad logic of ‘twice two is four’ and can’t see how anyone could think otherwise. Problem is, folks who wind up on the wrong side of that equation often enough will end up writing ‘twice two is five’ with their votes – and with their middle fingers. Libertarians simply don’t have the conceptual tools or the will to answer these instances when people go against their own rational interests, which is near front among the reasons why they’re in such a pickle these days.


The principle of self-own-ership

Again, this is me just pointing out the self-inflicted wounds that libertarian idealism has garnered over the past five decades – whether it’s their utopian vision pitting itself against their immediate policy goals, or their cynical willingness to toy around with not-too-friendly private forces basically coming back to bite them in the end. Am I enjoying this? Little bit. Not too much, though, given the seriousness of some of the problems I just highlighted.

As I said above, all of the foregoing may look like an extended exercise in kicking the advocates of a largely-beaten and -discredited political philosophy when they’re down. And to a certain degree, it’s just that. But, as a great fictional libertarian-minded Bat Durston once said: ‘Mercy is the mark of a great man. Guess I’m just a good man. … Well, I’m alright.’

Paradoxes of an assimilated Americanised quarter-Jew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy birthday to Tollers; happy landing to Yutu

Today is doubly worth celebrating for lovers of myth, as the 127^th birthday of the great English Saxonist, philologue and fantasy novelist John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, author of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and as the date on which the People’s Republic of China landed a lunar rover named Yutu 玉兔 on the far side of the moon.

Firstly: a few well-deserved and completely-inadequate words of appreciation for Tolkien, the great master of his genre, on his birthday.

Beloved by the masses for his Lord of the Rings trilogy; beloved by greens for his environmental politics, by Catholics for his Catholicism, by distributists for his hobbitly ideals, by conlangs for—okay, you get the idea; Tolkien was also an ardent admirer of the poetic language of Old England, and indeed also of the wild virtues that belonged properly to this newly-Christened people. Tolkien’s interest in and preference for the pre-Norman Teutonic culture of that time was, of course, in no way motivated by racialism or by white supremacism. A South African who loathed and denounced apartheid, he had harsh words indeed for the species of ‘ruddy little ignoramus’ which would make such hateful use of his life’s work and interests.

Instead, Tolkien was drawn to several aspects of Old English life at once. He appreciated the pre-Christian mythology for its ‘nobility and heroism’; but I suspect (given the place in his lore for hobbits) that he also appreciated a mythical system that would not overlook as holy the seemingly-small and seemingly-insignificant: ‘in the flower as it grows, in the animal as it moves’. On the other hand, however, he also appreciated the ‘early sanctified and Christianised’ culture that took its place, which blossomed under the tutelage of Benedictine spirituality, and felt intuitively that there was a distinct thread connecting the two together.

What seems to have been obvious to Tolkien’s imaginative philological and literary eye is something I’m still struggling with myself. Like Tolkien, I have few illusions about history being anything other than a ‘long defeat’, but even in such defeats there is such a thing as strategy. I don’t think it would have been lost on Tolkien that the society he admired blossomed in the long shadow left by the fall of Western Rome, or that it was structured specifically to weather the conditions wrought by that fall. Indeed, the stories he garnered the most popularity for telling, were all set against precisely such an epic tragœdy, and they were aimed at getting us to see the little ‘bright spots’ in the darkness within which nobility, heroism, and even homelier forms of goodness and decency could shine brilliantly.

One thing, however, that Tolkien seems to have done better than any other author – better than Joseph Campbell, better even than that old socialist William Morris for whom both he and I share such a deep and abiding affection – was that he successfully got modern people to think seriously about myth. He touched his readers at a place in their hearts where they could be made to understand certain truths about themselves and about their world. And he exercised that ability in order to evoke a sense of wonder that could then be turned to the philosophical. And that brings me to my next appreciation.

One knows not what Tolkien would have made of putting rovers on the Moon, though he was certainly dissatisfied enough with the technological horrors that the Second World War produced that he might yet have viewed it with a jaundiced eye. I do think that there are certain aspects of China, both in its pre-modern and in its present-day formation, which Tolkien might appreciate. There are a number of others that he would almost certainly abhor as redolent of Saruman’s hubris.

Be that as it may. The Chinese government has just landed – for the first time in human history – an exploratory rover on the far side of the moon, controlled via a satellite currently orbiting the LaGrange point L2. In addition to the other forms of scientific research being done, the Chinese probe is also experimenting with the possibility of lunar agriculture, which is a rather exciting development (and I tend to think that this predilection for agriculture would be one of the qualities Tolkien would admire). By any measure, this feat of Chinese space exploration is a boon to the scientific and technological communities.

But there is another, humanistic side to consider. The early NASA missions during the Space Race of the 1950’s and 1960’s were all named after various Attic and Roman gods: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo; however, the modern missions have names that are far more prosaic. It seems at first glance that the Chinese lunar missions are following a very similar pattern. The lunar lander is called Chang’e, the rover Yutu, and the control satellite Queqiao – all being immediate references to Buddhist and traditional Chinese mythology. Such names would never have flown, so to speak, in Mao’s day – smatching as they do of the Old Society and its ‘feudal superstitions’. However, modern China is a very different place. The people are rapidly rediscovering religion; the government and its projects have to keep pace. Whenever such cultural shifts are mentioned, it seems, cynicism always seems to be the order of the day regarding Chinese motivations. But I’m personally a bit more sanguine than most Western commentators are about the People’s Republic’s ability to weather and withstand the now decades-old crisis of meaning – China’s government is far more robust and skilful in such matters than Anglophone media will ever be ready to admit, and its people never quite so easily duped as they seem to imagine.

It is still an interesting shift to notice: not just in rhetoric, but in substance. The sky as seen from Chinese soil is getting clearer even as Chinese rockets have powered through it, and it is now ringing with the sound of half-forgotten voices. Don’t see that with the jaded eyes of cynicism or the spoilt ones of positivism, but with the eyes of myth – you may see something you weren’t expecting. One heartfelt toast to Tolkien, and another to the Rabbit in the Moon!

A happy(ish) New Year

This year so far has had its ups and downs, short though it has been. I got to visit my parents in Providence, Rhode Island and my ‘home-away-from-home’ Antiochian parish in Pawtucket over Christmas, which I enjoyed immensely. Got to spend some good time with the kids, introduce them to new books - also deeply enjoyable. But then came the trip home. We discovered at the airport that one of the kids’ passports was missing and that one of his toys was missing. And then we took off his outer layer of pants when he refused to go to the bathroom at the airport, so he would have something dry to wear if he had an accident. And then we lost that. Got into the Minneapolis airport where I discovered to my chagrin that I had scheduled our taxi service for the wrong day. Jessie and I decided I should cancel that cab ride, take one home myself from the airport, drive one of our own cars back to the airport and pick everybody else up. She called me once I got on the cab to confirm the plan, but I set the phone down in the cab and only realised I’d left it there after the cabbie had driven off with it. Then I went in the house and discovered that the only one of our garage door openers that worked was back at the airport with my mother-in-law. I had to Skype-chat them from the office computer to tell them the situation. Long story short, we all got back in one piece, but about twice as tired and cranky as any of us needed to be. And I did ultimately get my phone back; the cabbie was indeed an obliging gent. But that is how I spent my New Year’s Day.

I sincerely wish, gentle readers, that your New Year’s was better than mine! Best wishes for health and prosperity to you all!

Suhrawardî’s philosophy of lights

The Iranian sûfî Shahâb ad-Dîn Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardî is a fascinating philosophical figure. Having read his Allegorical Treatises and his Shape of Light, I still feel very far from beginning to grasp the core of his meaning. His biography is fascinating. At first a rather straight-laced Aristotelian in the model of Avicenna, Suhrawardî turned instead to a more Platonic-influenced mysticism after a dream in which he was told by Aristotle that the Islamic philosophers he followed did not grasp even ‘one part in a thousand’ of the knowledge held by the sûfiyyah. He founded his own school of mystical philosophy called ‘Illuminationism’. Given that he held in the highest esteem the martyred sûfî Mansûr e-Hallâj (whose sayings led him to be convicted and executed as a heretic), it is unsurprising that Suhrawardî himself met a similar fate to Hallâj: he was executed at the age of thirty-eight, at the behest of the conservative Sunnî ulama for supposedly cultivating an esoteric and heretical form of Shî’ite theology.

Suhrawardî’s universe is completely suffused with sublimities: divine light, love, spiritual freedom. The formally-Platonic influences on Suhrawardî are apparent in these writings, but they do not stifle him. He even considers the crudest forms of matter to be expressions of divine light – light which filters down even to the lowest and most humble things in the material world. (There is something remarkably Gregorian about this.) Suhrawardî is also insistent on the distinctions of various lights – he is not a simple pantheist in his thinking. But this very principle of spiritual freedom, this personal approach to the differentiation of lights, necessitates a kind of hierarchy in his thinking. (Suhrawardî was executed as a radical, but, good mediæval Platonist that he was, he has a classical-conservative streak.)

The illuminations of matter, of space and time per se, are (and here we meet the echoes of Plotinus) the furthest extent of the emanations of the divine light, almost to the point of total dissipation. And yet, Suhrawardî assures us, ‘matter enlightened by intelligence and the soul may point to its essence’. There is nothing of Gnosticism to be found here: matter not only matters (and is a ‘shape of light’ in itself), but it is good because the awareness of higher lights, of the love of Allâh, is only possible through the human mind’s real and necessary relationship to matter.

From here, Suhrawardî begins speaking of two (partially-Platonised) Aristotelian categories: the necessary and the possible, the knowledge of which is imparted from an awareness of material causes. Reflection on the relationship between necessity and possibility, in turn, leads matter to reflect back upon its own nature as light and to turn back toward the Source of Divine light. ‘Two things cannot be necessary at the same time.’ The comprehension of the Source of light brings the soul to an awareness of the various ‘Plotinian’ gradations in the emanation of all forms of light from Allâh, the One (Self-Existent and Necessary), the first of which is Intelligence.

In turn, on the other side, the soul’s awareness progresses through stages – from the concern with material satisfactions and wants, to the self-reproach of the conscience, to obedience, to inward peace, to satisfaction with the right, and impelled further to closeness to the Divine, and from thence to purification. Above and beyond all this, the power that impels closeness and purification, is the Holy Ghost, for which Suhrawardî uses the unusual (for an Islamic thinker) name of Farkilit instead of the more common Rûh al-Qudus. Intriguingly, Suhrawardî’s Farsi transliteration of the Greek Christian term παράκλητος, and his apparent refusal to translate the with the usual Arabic gloss of ‘Ahmad’ (from περικλυτος), places him far closer to a Christian understanding of God than most other Muslim commentators – including the authors of the footnotes to the edition of Shape of Light that I was reading, who prefer the more standard Islamic interpretation.

Suhrawardî concludes his commentary with a layered understanding of human knowledge of the Divine light, starting with a knowledge of natural law – or rather, Divine law as drawn from observation of matter (sharî‘ah), then progressing along a path (tarîqah) by means of intuitive knowledge (ma‘rifah) and finally achieving the inward truth (haqîqah) which is otherwise inaccessible. The Shape of Light concludes with a sparkling metaphor in which he likens the Divine light to water which flows from a great wellspring, which ‘all receive in accordance with their need’.

Suhrawardî’s Allegorical Treatises are far harder to break into than The Shape of Light; they consist of a number of highly-symbolic and mythopœic anecdotes, often couched in the form of fables, that are meant to carry the esoteric and intuitive knowledge that he was attempting to impart to his students. These treatises are interesting in particular, because they take up the Platonic interest in myth as a vehicle for the transmission of personal, intuited truths. And they look directly to the font which Plato himself, and certain of his successors like Plutarch, preferred and indicated in his own Dialogues (particularly the Gorgias, the Phædo and the Republic): to wit, Persian mythology. For this reason in particular, Suhrawardî’s philosophy was apparently taken up by Gujarati Parsees in the early 17^th century.

In general, these myths are meant to guide one to realisations of intellectual truths which lie hidden from the senses; throughout the Treatises, Suhrawardî repeatedly uses the image of a bird bound in a leather sack and trapped in a cage by a king, or by hunters. Again, though, he stops well shy of Gnosticism; he is not a foe of the world of sense-perceptions and he does not regard the people who still rely on the senses as his enemies. However, he is not blind to the enmity, torture and death that those who know the truth will incur if they speak directly of what they know – even if these tortures and death are of no ultimate concern to the one who truly has the knowledge he claims. These myths lie somewhere between Æsop and Plato’s Socrates. The couching of his knowledge in mythopœic terms affords him some degree of plausible deniability in the face of those who would see shut him up permanently – though, like Socrates, clearly that wasn’t first and foremost in his mind. Suhrawardî’s foremost concern was that folk be able to see themselves, and not to be blinded or driven by perversity into deeper darkness.

Suhrawardî is a Shî‘a Muslim and not a crypto-Christian, of course, but the brief flashes of congruence (somewhat, but as shown, not wholly through his Platonism) with a Christian worldview are too tempting and too beautiful to ignore. His treatment of the Holy Ghost as Spirit and as Light, the sight of prophets rather than one specific prophet or angel, and his direct quotations without commentary from the Gospel according to Saint John fall into this category. These may indeed be broader sûfî tendencies of which I’m only beginning to become aware. Fr Elie, my Antiochian priest in Pawtucket, was particularly intrigued by the potentials of the life and sayings of Mansûr e-Hallâj. But, whether one takes him as a representative of this broader tradition or as a unique philosophical innovator within that tradition, Suhrawardî is nonetheless well worth taking seriously. He presents us with a challenging religious ressourcement of a certain classical-Platonist preoccupation with myth and its power to provoke people to transcend themselves. This preoccupation, coming through the pen of an Iranian Muslim, is one which (in an age of resurgent paganisms, sæcular hero-worship and Jordan Peterson YouTube seminars) needs to be more robustly met from within a specifically-Christian ambit.

EDIT: A reader of the blog, Daniel S, kindly notes that Suhrawardî is not a Shî‘a Muslim but is instead reliably considered to be a Sunnî sûfî belonging to the Shâfi‘î school of jurisprudence. My apologies for the error.

Holy Hierarch Ecgwine, Bishop of Worcester

Bishop Saint Ecgwine of Worcester

Our father among the saints, the holy bishop Ecgwine of Worcester, is commemorated on 30 December in the Orthodox Church. Ecgwine, most likely related by blood to the Iclingas, nephew to the infamous Penda and to his son Æþelræd, was raised by parents who, unlike their forebear, were devoted Christians, and raised their son befittingly. The young Ecgwine decided early to pursue a career in the Church he loved, became a priest-monk among the Benedictines of Mercia, and spent several years fruitfully preaching the Gospel among the still largely-heathen Angles of the West Midlands. In 693, against his will, he was unanimously at the behest of king, noblemen, clergy and commons elected Bishop of Worcester, whose seat lay in the sub-kingdom of Hwicce.

As bishop, Ecgwine served under the reign of his uncle Æþelræd, who became known in the years after for his patronage of Benedictine monasteries. He quickly became known for his fair and honest judgements in legal disputes, for his personable warmth and friendliness to the common people who came to him, and for his particular love for and defence of the defenceless, poor and marginalised: orphans and widows in particular. In spite of his easygoing manner and his general disregard for rank and circumstance in his own behalf, he nonetheless held forth firmly and with great zeal when it came to theological truths and the interests of the powerless. He sternly rebuked the excesses of his noble kinsmen and friends, and in particular lambasted them for their ill-treatment of the poor: this cost him a great deal of the goodwill among the nobility that had lifted him to office. He soon found himself by these disgruntled nobility slandered and falsely accused of various ecclesiastical abuses, and even the friendship of his uncle Æþelræd could not shield him from the pernicious effects of these slanders.

Ecgwine, trusting in God, ordered himself to be fettered at the ankles in irons, and the keys cast into the River Avon. He thereupon left his diocæse under guard for Dover, where he boarded a ship to Rome to be judged by the Pope of Rome, all the while bearing himself meekly as a prisoner. They made the journey to Rome over land, and at one point crossed the Alps, where he and his party ran out of water. Some among his guards mocked him, and dared him to call forth water from the rocks as Moses had in the desert. They were hushed by those who feared Christ and acknowledged Ecgwine’s innocence, who repeated their entreaty sincerely to the fettered bishop, who, forgiving those who mocked him, knelt down and began to pray earnestly. Wondrously, a pure and clear spring of water burst forth from the rocks, quenching the thirst of the whole party.

When Ecgwine arrived in Rome, he went to pray at the tomb of the Holy Apostles. On the way there he crossed a bridge and a hunger took him; he asked his guards for something to eat. One of them went to fish in the Tiber, and caught a large fish, which had stuck in its gullet the very same key that Saint Ecgwine had thrown into the Avon back in England. This wonder proved Ecgwine’s innocence even to the most unbelieving of his guards, who unshackled him. The Pope of Rome thus gladly cleared Ecgwine’s name and restored to him the eparchy of Worcester.

Æþelræd king grew closer to the saintly Ecgwine after his return from Rome, and entrusted the schooling of his sons to the bishop. He even granted his nephew some woodland on the Avon’s banks, to which he loved to flee alone for prayer. On one occasion, a herdsman named Eof who served Ecgwine went by this wood, and the Holy Theotokos there appeared to him with angels on either side of her, a rood in her arm and an open book in her hands. Eof heard wondrous rousts lifted in song around the place. He fled there amazed and told Ecgwine what had befallen him; after which the saint came thence and himself also saw the same vision. The Holy Theotokos then blessed Ecgwine with her rood, and bade him break the ground there for a monastery: Evesham Monastery, named after the same herdsman Eof who had found the place. This is commemorated as the first appearance of the Mother of God to the people of England.

Not long after the monastery grounds were consecrated, in 704, Æþelræd king gave up his throne to his brother Cœnred, took the tonsure and lived out the rest of his days a brother-monk at Bardney Abbey in Lincs. Cœnred, like his brother, found Ecgwine worthy and more of his support, saw to the funding and construction of Evesham Monastery during its early years, and later encouraged the church council at Alcester to fully recognise the abbey’s rights.

Ecgwine had been for many years a close friend of Saint Aldhelm of Sherborne. When, in 709, Aldhelm reposed in the village of Doulting in Somerset, Saint Ecgwine knew of it through a dream, and hurried southward to accompany the procession of Saint Aldhelm’s remains from Doulting to Malmesbury Abbey, where he was interred. At each stop on the way, Saint Ecgwine had crosses erected in memory of his departed friend.

The Bishop was made the abbot of the new monastery at Evesham the following year, while continuing to perform his duties as bishop. He loved both the monastery, and the Mother of God to whom it was dedicated, and had lifelong a particular devotion to the Holy Theotokos. In the last years of his earthly life, he was struck with a lengthy illness, but this did not diminish but instead strengthened his perseverance in prayer; he reposed in peace on 30 December 717, and his sainthood was recognised very soon after, with his incorrupt and wonderworking relics being placed in honour at the same Benedictine Abbey at Evesham where he had spent much of his life. He was beloved by the folk of the West Midlands, and particularly the poor to whom he had always been close and within reach.

Of the house of the kings of Mercia,
You consecrated all of your youth to the Lord,
And, having become a bishop, you did not hesitate
To reproach the great ones of this world for their faults.
O founder of the holy monastery of Evesham,
Saint Ecgwine, beseech the Lord to save us!