Saints Peter and Fevronia of Murom: Russian patrons of familial love
The family represented the initial cell of human society. The holy history of the Old Testament shows that the state was not formed at once. The Old Testament people had no state before Joseph’s brothers went to Ægypt.
Christian patriotism may be expressed at the same time with regard to a nation as an ethnic community and as a community of its citizens. The Orthodox Christian is called to love his fatherland, which has a territorial dimension, and his brothers by blood who live everywhere in the world… At the same time, it is contrary to Orthodox ethics to divide nations into the best and the worst and to belittle any ethnic or civic nation. Even more contrary to Orthodoxy are the teachings which put the nation in the place of God or reduce faith to one of the aspects of national self-awareness.
It’s a worthy goal to resist nationalism in its current, explicitly post-Christian form, as the foregoing Christian thinkers in the linked Commonweal article have publicly done. However, to do this effectively, there needs to be a comprehensive, anthropological account of the separate human origins of the nation and of the state. When I say anthropological, I mean one that is accountable to the data regarding human society’s material origins. However, we should know well enough by now that, however much we Christian critics of voluntarism and nominalism may reject the is-ought distinction, mere insistence on facts does not have the persuasive power we need. Mere logos, issued forth by the babbling superego at the end of its tether, clearly no longer suffices. Mere pathos won’t do either, and nationalism is unanswerable on the sole basis of competing winged visions, competing ethea. My suspicion is that logos, pathos, ethos and mythos are all integrally necessary to posit a challenge to the siren call of nationalism. A comprehensive anthropological account of nation and state is therefore, by necessity, theological or at the very least mythological.
The fundamental organising principle of the society is the family, whether we consider that the band or tribe, or the nuclear family. The two forms have the same institutional function and material purpose. Of all human institutions the family, forged from the basic erotic urge and the desire to procreate, is more deeply rooted in our præ-history than any other social institution. Recorded history, on the other hand, gave us three subsidiary institutions: the nation, the state and the market—in that order.
Because state and market are the most ‘recent’ and the most rationalised of the subsidiary institutions, the case that the state precedes or undergirds the market is the easiest to make from a sæcular perspective. Karl Polanyi convincingly argues this case in The Great Transformation, using both œconomic and historical evidence: ‘that the modern market œconomy is a special, historically rooted form of social organisation. It is not a natural, universal system for organising societies, as its champions assert.’ Specifically, Polanyi demonstrates convincingly that market processes are wholly dependent on a juridical-institutional rationalism that can only derive from modern state structures. Because the libertarian / (anarcho-)capitalist political mythology is the most obviously false and most obviously anti-Christian, it’s also the easiest for consistent Christians (as well as sæcular conservatives, sæcular social-democrats and sæcular nationalists) to refute. The necessity of some kind of state control or state intervention in markets is thus indicated.
The gap between the nation and the state is less obvious, and it’s a tragœdy that this is a line that runs as a fault-line within Christendom (also within Islâm, Judaism and even Buddhism), and not just between sæcular and religious accounts of the human condition. I’ve made the argument before that Orthodox Christianity has better and more complete intellectual resources to draw on in distinguishing the nation from the state than the Western Christianities do – in part because of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine legacies of intentionally multi-national political projects. Unfortunately, we don’t use these resources because they have historically been at odds with the (in some cases understandable and just) desires of Orthodox peoples for political self-determination.
Here is where the invaluable witness of governance in post-colonial countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia, comes in. The naked artificiality of colonially-imposed Westphalian state structures and their inability to provide governance aligned to the common good provides the most obvious rebuke to those accounts of social reality which identify the nation with the state. An equal rebuke from the opposite direction involves the success story (however qualified by various social problems, later structural weakness and corruption) of the Qing Empire in building a convincingly multinational modern state. Each case seems to suggest that national belonging precedes efficacious state structures, and moreover that state structures need not map neatly onto tribal or cultural identities. These imperfect but compelling witnesses – furnished forth by the Byzantine state, the Yugoslav state, the Qing state, the Czechoslovak state, even the Russian state and also arguably the sæcular supra-national aspirations of pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism – alluringly suggest a broadly ‘Eastern’ answer to the challenge of the Westphalian order: an answer rooted in an autocratic understanding of the state*.
This leaves us with the third, most troublesome and most intellectually-hoary of our distinctions: that between the family and the nation. Here is where even the witness of scientific materialism and anthropology inevitably fades off into the mists of mythos and we are left with competing incommensurate comprehensive accounts of the good. Ironically, the further away we get into the præ-history of human sociality, the more closely the post-religious liberal / New Atheist (including the 1970s sex-positive post-feminist) mythology of human social origins looks suspiciously similar to the most virulently reactionary blood-and-soil alt-right nationalist mythology.
In both accounts, the family is a distinctly unnatural and unwelcome imposition on the basic reality of the primordial hunter-gatherer band. In the post-religious New Atheist-cum-third-wave feminist account, the family was a structure imposed concurrently with the rise of agrarian settlements, towns and cities. It superimposed itself upon the natural, healthy, primordial equality of men and women and the uninhibited protean sexual liberty which that equality is taken to presuppose. Along with the family came all the great host of social evils of civilisation: patriarchy; hero-worship; sexual division of labour; hoarding of agrarian wealth and so on. The nouvelle nouvelle-droite inversion of this mythology differs in only one respect: the assumption of a primordial equality. The right-wing mythology of human social origins also posits the hunter-gatherer band before the family. But instead of seeing the family as the origin of various inequalities, they see the family as the origin of various forms of effeminacy and weakening of the tribal spirit, the kin affiliation which they take to be the fundamental organising principle of human existence.
It is only when we begin to consider this new nationalism, not as a set of political principles but instead as a mythos rooted in the exaltation of primordial brutality, that we begin to truly comprehend its power and its seductive spiritual drive. It is a mythos, moreover, that is not founded independently of feminism, but precisely as an inversion of feminism predicated on the flight from feeling: a flip-side of the coin, as it were. In place of the Goddess myth which was erected precisely as a pseudo-anthropological attack on Christianity, we have another form of pagan mythologising happening on the same pattern: only priapic-totemic rather than yonic-totemic.
It therefore becomes clear that the problem, the contradiction, regarding nationalism lies at a deeper level than the superstructural problems of policy organisation of the state. They relate to the basic problem of the sexual division of labour. And the oppositional stances taken up by both the post-feminist and the nouvelle nouvelle-droite accounts of præhistory stem from the current relation between sex and œconomic life being profoundly sick and alienating. But we can’t simply pop these duelling mythologies back in the bag, so to speak. At the risk of sounding crypto-Sorelian rather than Marxist, they can be resolved only by appealing to a counter-mythology. Here I appeal to Scripture.
The Scriptural witness, which is not history but a vision of the Liturgical ordering of the cosmos, does however confirm a hierarchical ranking of præhistoric and early-historic human institutions. Of the four, only the family—however rooted it is in our fleshy desires and animal appetites—is prælapsarian. Sex and procreation between men and women is blessed by God as good, prior to the Fall, in the very first chapter of Genesis.
The nation (goy גוי), conceived of as the band or tribe, appears in Scripture only after the Flood in Genesis 10, and it appears on account of the drunken shame of Noah and the behaviour of his sons on beholding it. It is a postlapsarian development. Contrary to those who posit a racist theory of Scripture, this is not a curse only on Ham: it is Noah’s curse on all of his sons that they be thus divided from each other. Note that in the original Hebrew Noah does not bless Shem or Japheth, only God. The term also appears in the promise of God to Abraham, that he would become the father of many nations. But this promise is contingent on his obedience to God, which is lost when he enters Ægypt, and regained only after he proved himself willing to sacrifice Isaac.
The state and its structures – the idea of ‘rule’ or ‘dominion’ (mashal משל) applied in a coercive and legal sense – appears in Scripture only in concert with another sin: the betrayal of Joseph by his brothers into Ægyptian slavery in Genesis 37. It is noteworthy that in subsequent chapters Joseph himself is first a victim, and then a master, of the Ægyptian state! Notice how the ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’ promised by the state corrupts family ties (first Joseph’s brothers to him, and then Potiphar’s wife to her family) even as it legitimates itself by those ties and claims to extend them!
The very first instance of market relations in Scripture appears at the tail end of Genesis, and it appears only because Joseph is managing the affairs of the Ægyptian state: that is to say, he is regulating mercantile affairs. The term trade (karah כרה) appears only in Deuteronomy 2, in the desert concurrently with the Mosaic law, and at that only after (and because) the Hebrews were found worshipping the golden calf and desiring to go back into Ægypt after entering the wilderness. The implication in Deuteronomy is that Moses is issuing laws relating to buying and selling, only because the hearts of the Hebrews have been hardened against the Edomites, and they have fallen away from the early gift-œconomic relations of Abraham and Isaac with the Canaanites. Note well: the idea of regulating markets is issued by the lawgiver – the very icon in Scripture of the just state!! – directly in answer to the wayward and sinful Hebrews’ worship of golden idols!
See how Scripture precisely in its mythopœic account of the human – and the Hebrew – story thus categorically affirms the primacy of family before tribe; tribe before state; state before market. Each progression, each differentiation of social life into ever more complex, highly-determined and rational forms, represents a further falling away from the Edenic purpose of God for man. And yet, we are not called upon to retrogress atavistically: we cannot recreate Eden on our own power. Even after the appearance of Christ, the Mosaic law is still needful for us.
But the logic of familiality, even of erotic desire, is written into the very fabric of Creation and even our cosmology as Christians. We do not worship a priapic hero-god who slew a monstrous Tiamat and created the world from her corpse. We do not worship the stone idols of Willendorf and Dolní Věstonice. More to the point, though: we do not worship a disembodied monad, but instead a God who is in a more-than-metaphorical sense a Father with an Incarnate Son, with a very human Mother. Even though scientific facts are on our side (like the fact that a healthy man of any race and a healthy woman of any other race can naturally produce healthy, viable and fertile offspring), this is ultimately the only way to out-mythologise, to out-narrate, the new nationalism and its nouvelle nouvelle-droite intellectual underpinnings. We gain nothing by reverting to an insistence on the intermediary mythologies – and particularly not Hobbesian and Lockean ones of state and market – that have long since ceased to convince even the converted.
* A word of caution is in order here. When I use the term autocratic, I precisely do not mean what is now vulgarly called totalitarian or authoritarian-populist – a Weberian ideal posited in bad-faith opposition to the democratic or free or liberal rules-based world, with its roots in the broad Machiavellian-Montesquieuian-Gibbonite strain of Whig orientalism. For one thing, this dichotomy is not useful. Since 2003 I have been keenly sensitive to the fact that democracies are capable of – and now routinely do – behave in ways that Arendt would not hesitate to call totalitarian. This is one of the reasons why I still single out Christopher Hitchens, Liu Xiaobo and Václav Havel for particular censure: they were, when they lived, all advocates of democratic totalitarianism insofar as they enabled the wilful distortions of truth by the Bush Administration that led to over 600,000 wrongful deaths in Iraq, and the mainstream acceptability of rendition and torture. By this same token, the autocratic governments I mentioned above were not absolutist or totalitarian by Arendt’s understanding, for the simple reason that the heads of state were not laws unto themselves.
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