Solovyov and the problem of the (post-)sæcular

Over at The Dorothy Option I recently wrote a guest post critiquing the political doctrine of intégrisme slightly (and I do mean that; the true point of difference I have with Josias-form intégrisme is embedded in the third sentence) from its left, borrowing in particular from the theopolitical themes of Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. The central point, I hope, is clear. Post-liberalism either will become, or already is, a semi-permanent feature of our current blown-apart political life. We can see this given the rise of various nationalisms, populisms, fundamentalisms and cults of personality throughout the world. Given even the recent history of illiberal ideologies in the twentieth century, mistakes in articulation can prove to be enormously costly: not just in terms of body count, but in terms of our collective and individual souls.

This, and this alone, has been my concern in writing about intégrisme so critically. Particularly because I share so many of intégrisme’s concerns about the inward falsity of liberalism – namely, that individual human projects and destinies are not so easily disentangled from public life; and that both the material and intellectual-emotional concerns of people are wrapped up in questions of policy in an intimate and messy way – at one point I came very close to an intégriste position. This position was challenged by life. I became intimately involved in communities – the Antiochian Church in particular; but also Saimasai, which included both Russian Orthodox and Hanafî Sunnî Muslims – that had been subject to religious persecution by illiberal régimes whose theopolitical vision was not entirely unlike the intégriste one.

And yet, these communities themselves were not liberal. Despite a certain degree of commitment to pluralism and tolerance of beliefs in tension with each other, the community in Saimasai was in many ways deeply traditionalist. On questions of gender rôles, sexual ethics more generally, dress, hospitality ethics, insider-outsider distinctions, trust of religious authorities, relationship with the state – Saimasai was markedly different from the standard American conception of the public space. I found the same thing quite true with the Antiochian Church in Pawtucket. Despite it being a very American immigrant community, and despite their being open and welcoming beyond my wildest expectations to an outsider like me, the internal norms among the parishioners were very different from my Anglo, crypto-Quaker upbringing. Again, at Saint Mary’s there were very different, and far more traditional, norms regarding family obligations, sexual ethics, hospitality and politics.

The history of these communities has also affected my thinking. All three of the præ-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet histories of the Qazaq people and of Kazakhstan generally have impressed on me the precariousness of the hard-won (and sometimes not-so-stable, riddled with tensions and bigotries) modus vivendi between Russian and Qazaq there. That’s not something to be lightly brushed aside.

The same feeling holds true with my second-hand experience of Arab nationalism. (I was in the same parish as Michel ‘Aflaq’s niece. Listening carefully, I did notice that several of the parishioners had ties to or sympathies with the SSNP, the PFLP or the Ba‘th Party. One could say I absorbed much of my sympathy for Arab nationalism by osmosis.) For a long time Arab nationalism was the only viable way in which Christians in the Middle East could participate in public life without either: adopting Ottomanist mannerisms; affecting an outward passivity in the face of Islâmic dominance; or resorting to preëmptive sectarian violence. On the negative side, the options available to the Orthodox Christian communities of Palestine, Syria and Ægypt were remarkably limited; on the positive side, even nationalists who were not Christian understood the overlap between Christian concerns and Arabist ones in the Middle East.

These and several other observations from my life in China both impressed on me the dangerous fallacies of liberalism in its attempts to circumscribe and flatten the deep community lives I witnessed, and also the equal danger of ‘flattening’ that life in the other direction by yoking state and Church (or state and mosque) into a master-slave dialectic. Deep-reading Russian, Arabic and Qazaq history and political philosophy – along with Orthodox theology – has put me on a very difficult tightrope to walk: a tightrope that, granted, involves reappropriating some aspects of socialism and even Marxism into my worldview.

But walking that tightrope is necessary for a Christian to do, because to do otherwise is to court (self-)deception and the temptations of ideological idolatry. In following Christ, no Christian should put themselves into an easy alliance with Pilate and Herod, and reach gladly for the ‘glaive of Cæsar’. But likewise no Christian should go the Essene route and reject the state in toto, in a world where functioning state or para-state structures are often the only thing standing between earth and a not-so-figurative hell for ‘the least of these’. No Christian should be a Sadducee and wish for a Sanhedrin to govern all aspects of our ritual and public life, figuring that this life and the next are of the same kind. On the other hand, no Christian should become a Zealot and seek to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth by the ‘shortcut’ of messianic violence. Our Messiah came to conquer the kingdom of death, not to rule by it.

The Gospel message is not one of otherworldly comfort and consolation. It is a message of metaphysical, and therefore political, radicalism. We are called upon to behave as though not only our beloved friends and neighbours, but even our enemies, will partake in the Resurrection with us. We can, and we should, stand in solidarity with the rejected and crucified peoples of the world, just as our Lord was crucified between two ‘thieves’ (i.e. Zealots); but we are not to adopt the methods of Barabbas. Even in conditions of violence and war (which we are told will be with us even to the end), there is simply no room in the message of Christ for eliminationism of any sort. Because we are partaking in æternity, also: the anarchist temptation to ‘wipe the slate clean’ and start afresh, to recapture an Adamic existence in this world, is to be firmly resisted – even when that temptation is offered from an admirable purity of heart and a holy desire for heaven.

The intégristes are absolutely right that we (Christians especially) should not be easily able to discuss politics without thinking about our ultimate End. However, the most dangerous and most subtle temptation comes when we are clear about this fact, but less so about the nature – that is to say, personal character – of that End. And that is precisely the point on which the new intégristes are fuzzy, leading people like Ahmari to embrace personality-cult politics. This is why, in these discussions on the theopolitical turn that Americans are currently making – as in the Ahmari-French debate – I find my mind turning more and more toward specifically Russian apocalypticism.

Berdyaev had some rather backhanded praise for Vladimir Solovyov’s Tale of the Antichrist. Solovyov’s earlier suave, polished and meticulous ethical philosophy, which was essentially erotic poetry with a German inflection. On the other hand, Berdyaev commented that the Tale was not only dark and ominous, but carried a crude quality. It was sketch-like. It was left unfinished. I would personally add to this that it carries a distinct whiff of racist paranoia which should be neither condoned nor passed over in silence. But the Tale, as Berdyaev recognised, was perhaps one of the most enthralling and disquieting things Solovyov ever wrote. It represented Solovyov’s return to a distinctively-Russian style of apocalyptic, and it was all the more discomforting for the fact that it marked a turn away from Solovyov’s earlier optimistic winged visions of a liberal-theocratic utopia toward which human society was bending.

In the broad strokes, the Tale of the Antichrist narrates the life of the titular Antichrist, who is portrayed as a veteran, a wealthy capitalist and proud philanthropist, a ‘thinker, writer and public figure’ who possesses a keen and deeply spiritual mind. He is raised in an intellectual milieu of syncretism, born out of a devastating world war which pits Asia against the West. He is a practising ascetic; he opines convincingly on many of the world’s problems; he appeals at a deep root level to the human longing for spiritual fulfilment, creative freedom and unity. After his transforming rejection of Christ and his self-offering to the Evil One, he authors a book called The Open Way to Universal Peace and Prosperity, which, in Solovyov’s words:

united a noble respect for ancient traditions and symbols with a broad and daring radicalism in socio-political questions, joined a boundless freedom of thought with the most profound appreciation for everything mystical.

Using this book, the Antichrist proceeds to position himself as the leader of a ‘United States of Europe’, to deliver the human race everything it ever wanted – its spiritual longing for mystery and miracle, and not merely bread. All this, with the purpose of turning the human race towards him, and away from the person of Christ.

What is notable and indeed a bit disquieting about Solovyov’s Antichrist is that he can be read, as Berdyaev indeed interpreted it, as something of a self-criticism of his earlier work – or at least one possible interpretation of it. After Solovyov’s Antichrist is made President of Europe, he offers the world every possible physical need, every possible liberty, even every possible spiritual consolation. This includes the consolations of liberty, authority, tradition, asceticism, heroism, philosophy, scholastic accomplishment: but entirely without Christ. (What is further troubling about this story is how many Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians are won over to his side by these explicitly spiritual blandishments.) What Solovyov’s Antichrist offers is, in fact, a reflection in significant part of Solovyov’s own vision of social-liberal theocracy: devoid of Christ.

It is this last feature which is most important. Christians of all traditions must be especially on guard against ideologies and social fixations, including even those fixations which don’t look like fixations (asceticism, tradition, authority, liberty et cetera), which are offered as ends in themselves instead of as reflections of the personal truth of Christ, who for the love of all died and rose again.

In America it is all too easy for Christians to make an idolatrous fixation out of liberty. This is in part because our national mythos has set up the false goddess of political liberty as a rival to Christ. But hæresies have a striking tendency to arise in opposing pairs. As the failures of liberalism highlighted by Ferrara become ever more apparent, the temptation of the opposite hæresy becomes stronger. Dostoevsky and Solovyov both intuited that the hæresy which opposes liberalism will be an anthropological hæresy which emphasises the spiritual potentials of man, which seeks to attend to his desires for mystery and miracle and hierarchy. It distresses me deeply that our current crop of intégristes – led by Ahmari and his cohort in this country, against the liberalism of French – have this anthropological fixation, rather than a devotion to the only Theánthrōpos.