The nature of the true melek

I have a very special place in my heart (and in my icon corner) for Holy Father Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow. While I was inquiring into the Orthodox faith, Father Sergey Voronin – then of Beijing’s Holy Dormition Church – gave to me a book of his sermons. It occurred to me as I read the introduction that this was an extraordinary and gifted orator, but also one who was deeply engaged in both the spiritual life and in the outer world. Father Filaret was, as much as any other man apart from Tsar Aleksandr II – the man who freed the serfs. He authored much of the Tsar’s 1861 proclamation whereby the institution of serfdom was abolished in Russia. This must be borne carefully in mind, for he also said the following.

Some people by the word freedom understand the ability to do whatever one wants… People who have the more allowed themselves to come into slavery to sins, passions, and defilements more often than others appear as zealots of external freedom, wanting to broaden the laws as much as possible. But such a man uses external freedom only to more severely burden himself with inner slavery. True freedom is the active ability of a man who is not enslaved to sin, who is not pricked by a condemning conscience, to choose the better in the light of God’s truth, and to bring it into actuality with the help of the gracious power of God. This is the freedom of which neither heaven nor earth are restrict.

Metropolitan Saint Filaret detested slavery and loved freedom, and that is instantly apparent in his writings – both this one and others. But it is clear that he did not understand freedom in a narrowly political or œconomic sense, as the ‘liberty’ championed in the political realm. For him, slavery to the passions, slavery to sin, was the worst form – a spiritual bondage to some lifeless and external idol. And it is also clear from this passage that he considered a ‘classical liberal’ or ‘libertarian’ approach to the law a means, not of ridding oneself or the social context of slavery, but permitting this inward slavery to deepen, to fester and to spread unchecked.

Part of the difference is one of definition. The classical liberal (or his rather more extreme ideological kin, the libertarian and the anarcho-capitalist) will tell you that self-ownership is possible and morally preferable, and on this basis he grounds his political philosophy. But it is clear that Holy Father Filaret – and, it should be noted, the Orthodox spiritual tradition more broadly – do not hold with that idea of self-ownership being ever truly possible. This may seem an extreme example, but it makes little sense to speak of an addict having self-ownership in the full philosophical sense, even though the legalistic commitments of the classical liberal (delineation of self-ownership as use-right) force him to pretend that he has it. Note well: as quoted in the article linked above, libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard dismisses as a ‘contextually irrelevant question’ the sole metaphysical criterion which Holy Father Filaret places as the defining feature of his understanding of freedom. This, if nothing else, should tell you: the Orthodox Christian understanding of freedom and the classical-liberal understanding of legal-political liberty are agonal to each other and talking at cross-purposes. At best, the classical liberal will demand, in perhaps a bit of a weary and irritated tone, that you stow all the God-talk in the back corner and pretend it is irrelevant to the discussion. At worst, his principle of self-ownership will demand a basic denial of faith.

But the differences, in fact, go far deeper. In practice, all human beings have such metaphysical commitments whether they know it or not. The totally-unburdened self of social contract theory is, by this point, a rather tattered myth – and the irony is that the people who still cling to that myth and its associated civil trappings unwittingly show its inner falsity in so doing. As our great American folk philosopher (and fellow Minnesotan) Bob Dylan astutely put it, no matter how powerful or rich or famous you are, ‘it may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody’. In the final, metaphysical sense: there is only one true owner, one true melek מלך. There are many others – human and otherwise – who falsely claim ownership. But what is the nature of the ownership that this melek claims upon us? Holy Father Filaret clarifies this question as well:

He who works from fear is a slave, he who labours in the hope of reward is a hireling. ‘The servant,’ (i.e., bondsman,) says JESUS CHRIST, ‘abideth not in the house for ever,’— we may add, nor does the hireling,—for it is but ‘the Son’ that ‘abideth ever’. ‘Fear hath torment’, says the beloved disciple, ‘he that feareth is not made perfect in love,’ whereas ‘perfect love casteth out fear’. Another Apostle says to Christians, in opposition to the Jews, ‘Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, FATHER.’ And thus the spirit of bondage, as well as the spirit of spiritual hire, is the lot of the Jews; but the lot of true Christians is the spirit of filial love towards GOD and the SAVIOUR. We may even say without contradicting the Apostle, that the true spirit of the Old Testament was the spirit of love, if it had not been clothed in bondage by the stiff-neckedness of the Jews.

We should understand by this language, that the nature of God’s ownership over us as revealed in the person of Christ is fundamentally different from the understanding which prevailed in the religion of the Second Temple. The dogmas of the Trinity themselves imply that God is not some kind of metaphysical slave-lord or dictator, but the God which is melek over all Creation instead is Himself a society of persons – or, indeed, one may even say a sobornost’ of persons – active in mutual love, dynamic in coöperative inter-participation. (I hope that Holy Father Filaret, close as he was to the Slavophils, would not object overmuch to this usage.) The dogma of the Incarnation, likewise, overthrows any possible political expectations that the melek, the anointed mashiyaĥ משיח, will be a Cæsarean conqueror of worldly glory and power. God, we may say rightly, owns us: but God does not want slaves to command and use. Instead, God is a loving Father; He wants children to receive His love and to love Him obediently in return.

Even though Metropolitan Saint Filaret’s vision of a God whose idea of freedom is enabling us to choose the better in Him is not first-order political, it does have direct political implications, just as the concept of sobornost’ as promoted by his contemporary Aleksei Khomyakov has direct political implications. Both Russians did favour, as we have seen, some ‘broadening of the laws’ – to wit, the abolition of serfdom – to allow for greater human flourishing. But neither of them did so uncritically. A body politic in which all people are considered to be, rightfully, children and heirs of the true God who reigns over creation – must be one which embraces limits, which conserves nature, which seeks a just and peaceful modus vivendi with its neighbours, and which actively invests in the physical and spiritual health and upbuilding of all of its members without the distinction of worldly rank, title or property.