Eine Liebe in Deutschland: a review

Stani (Piotr Lysek) and Pauline (Hanna Schygulla) in Eine Liebe in Deutschland

The 1983 East German film Eine Liebe in Deutschland (A Love in Germany), directed by Andrzej Wajda, is half-romance, half-political morality play. There is a semi-romantic central plotline in it. But more than that it is a film about moral trauma, specifically the moral trauma inflicted upon the German population by the fascist ideology. The presence of a mechanised, militarised state in the background running everything has a corrosive effect upon the soul. This film is, in a certain sense, a meditation on this corrosion: it is a meditation on how decent, caring, ordinary people in Germany could turn cruel in the presence of this ideology. It showcases how even petty jealousy, greed, suspicion, grief, fear of reprisal—what the Catholics would call ‘venialities’—can be alchemically transmuted into inhuman atrocities in the presence of such an ideology.

The framing alternates between Herbert Kropp (Otto Sander) and his son Klaus in the present day, exploring the town of Brombach in an attempt to find out what happened to Kropp’s mother; and flashbacks to the Second World War and Pauline Kropp’s life as a soldier’s wife on the home front. This device is, unfortunately, handled with all the narrative subtlety and deftness of a crowbar. The transitions between past and present are usually there to serve a cause. That is: they highlight a point of irony or black humour; or they demonstrate certain hypocrisies or euphemisms or failures of memory in those who lived during that time; or they explore the traumas and survivors’ guilt that afflicts them.

The central storyline, about the love-affair between the married Pauline Kropp (Hanna Schygulla) and the younger Polish POW Stanislaw Zasada (Piotr Lysak), is in a certain sense only the central hanger on which the rest of the mobile spins. The tale is told through the eyes of Kropp’s son Herbert, who provides the occasional narration from his current perspective. Even though Kropp is an adulteress and thus clearly morally compromised, in a certain sense she’s the most morally consistent and centred of her peers. Her ‘friends’ in the village all to some degree play a role in her and Zasada being discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. The case lands in the lap of an army commander, Lieutenant Meyer (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose intentions start off as ‘good’ to a certain extent, but whose decision-making is at every step compromised in grotesque ways: by Nazi ideology, by the orders of his superiors, and by ‘regulations’. In the end, Kropp is sent to a concentration camp, and Zasada is (incompetently) hanged.

For some reason I feel like the male characters in this movie got something of a fairer shake than the female ones. Whether it’s Herr Wyler (Gérard Desarthe), the sub-rosa antifascist who unsuccessfully pleads with his cupiditous wife not to inform on Pauline; or Melchior who allows Zasada to eat at the table with him despite it being against regulations—and later turns a blind eye to his affair with Kropp; or even Lieutenant Meyer who makes these half-arsed attempts within the scope of the Nazi bureaucracy to let Kropp and Zasada ‘off the hook’… they seem to get more sympathy from Wajda than the women do. At the same time, though, Wajda lets us see more clearly how the women face their moral universe and the contours within which they allow themselves to make compromises with the Nazi state and ideology.

To a certain degree, I feel like this movie deserved to have been scripted with greater subtlety and care than it was. The acting, particularly from Schygulla and Mueller-Stahl, is truly top-class; and the greater point of the film regarding the stories of the war that went untold and the secrets and small acts of collaboration that went unspoken in guilt or deliberate misremembrance—is a point worth exploring and telling well. (I feel like I need to watch that Kate Winslet movie The Reader after this; it seems to explore a similar point about guilt, memory and moral trauma.)

There are some darkly comedic moments to the movie, like when Meyer, his fumbling subordinate Schulze and Dr Borg all attempt to use hair and eye palettes, measuring tapes and phrenology equipment in an attempt to prove that Zasada is ‘Aryan’ so that Kropp can be gotten off of the charge of breaking the laws against ‘Rassenschande’; or when Meyer pathetically attempts to bribe a Polish high school teacher into being Zasada’s executioner. However, these flickers of farce only serve to demonstrate the dehumanising monstrosity that undergirds all of these comic absurdities: the treatment of human beings as essentially equivalent to breeding-stock, or the absolute negotiability of dignity and conscience in the face of a state with no regard for human life.

The romance plot is carried almost entirely by Schygulla’s on-screen magnetism – her complete command of her facial features and her ability to charm and smoulder with nothing more than a glance. Her male-lead counterpart, Lysak, is competent (and he can chew scenery with the best of them, especially during the medical examination scene), but most of the time he seems a bit hapless in the face of the shopkeeper’s shielded—but deep and scalding—emotions.

In the end, if I were to recommend A Love in Germany, it would be on the basis of Schygulla’s performance, as well as on some of the disturbing-but-needful ethical-psychological explorations in the middle. But the framing and a lot of the overarching narration is needlessly ham-handed, and I feel like the point about guilt and memory could have been made far better without Otto Sander’s fourth-wall-breaking monologues at the viewer at the beginning and end. I suspect that there are better movies about life-behind-the-lines in WWII Germany out there than this one.

Remembering the Nakba and Gaza today

In the past six days, Israeli armed forces have killed 126 people, including 31 children, and wounded 920 more after shelling Gaza and bombarding from the air. Nearly ten thousand Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes from the assault. This coordinated and deliberate display of military brutality against a civilian population comes as a result of protests against Israeli police, who have been aiding illegal Israeli settlers to forcibly evict Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem over the past several weeks.

According to any civilised measure of what constitutes just warfare, Israel’s retaliation to these protests is anything but just. The principles of necessity and proportionality are not only routinely ignored, but flouted, by Netanyahu’s misgovernment of miscreants. It is not, as the American press misreports it, a ‘clash’. It is not, as said misgovernment risibly calls it, a ‘civil war’. It is an act of ethnic cleansing, one which also targets and impacts the indigenous Christians of the Middle East.

It is necessary to remember that this is not a sectarian struggle. It is not about Muslims versus Jews. Christians have been integral to the Palestinian struggle since the beginning. The newspapers that were chiefly responsible for building the movement opposing Zionist settler-colonialism, al-Karmal and Falasṭîn, were run by Orthodox Christian editors: to wit, Najîb Naṣṣâr and ‘Îssa al-‘Îssa. The Palestinian Arab Congress arose out of the Muslim-Christian associations that arose as organic Arab nationalist societies in every major city in Palestine. The cause of Palestine is not a Muslim one only, it is a human one.

Of the Palestinian people who live in aš-Šayḵ Jarrâḥ, a significant proportion of them are in fact refugees from aṭ-Ṭalbiyyah in the western part of the city, which during the 1920s and 1930s was a predominantly Arab Christian neighbourhood. Between 1948 and 1967, the Israelis cheated or outright stole the land from the Arabic residents and kicked them into East Jerusalem. The current takeover by Israeli settlers, the evictions and the confiscation of property, are in fact a continuation of the initial Nakba which took place in 1948 and which is remembered each year today.

The Nakba is continuing in aš-Šayḵ Jarrâḥ and in Gaza, through the familiar pattern of people with guns terrorising people without guns. However, the people of Palestine are rising up against the unlawful evictions, and they deserve support. So far, that support has not been forthcoming from the United States or from the Biden Administration, which has been blocking UN Security Council action to stop the escalating violence against Palestinians. Moreover, they refuse to condemn the killing of children by the Israeli military. This is part of a definite pattern on the part of this administration, and one may be sure that the hypocrisy is being noticed abroad.

For that matter, it’s also necessary to remember that the Nakba is not just a Middle Eastern problem. It is a European problem. George Antonius’s book The Arab Awakening should be required reading on this topic. The British and French governments rankly betrayed their Arab allies during WWI, first with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and then with the Balfour Declaration. It was easier for them to foist off the ‘Jewish problem’ onto a subjugated and colonised population far away in the Middle East, than for them to deal with their own deep-seated anti-Semitism. The same principle held when it came to European support for Zionism after World War II. The same people who perpetrated the horrors of Shoah on European Jewry were content to send the rest of them packing to the Middle East: a way to assuage their guilty consciences without bearing any real cost.

(Even today, the openly anti-Semitic governments of Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine enjoy an alliance of convenience with the far-right ethnonationalist Likud misgovernment in Israel. And in the United States, men who can’t stand the idea of their children going to school with Jewish children openly tout their alliance with Israel. This ‘double game’ allows anti-Semitism in the West to continue to disguise itself as ‘friendship’, and also allows Israel to benefit from a continuing climate of hostility to Jews in Western nations.)

In the meantime, however, the Palestinian people cannot wait for justice. This Nakba Day, let us first begin by praying for an end to the violence. And then, in the spirit of that prayer, at the very least let us be courageous enough to acknowledge the truths of what is happening in Palestine. What is going on is not a ‘clash’ or a ‘civil war’ between two sides of equal strength which bear equal blame: one side has tanks and planes and nuclear weapons and the other side does not, and the more powerful side has no regard for restraint. What is going on is not a conflict over religion: it is a conflict over land. What is going on is also not a far-away iteration of irrational regional hatreds: it is the culmination of a long and deep-seated spiritual illness in the West, and it is one for which our governments and peoples bear responsibility. Once we have been courageous enough to acknowledge these truths, let us then translate that awareness into action. Israel’s ongoing crimes against Palestine must end, and international pressure must be brought to bear for that to happen. And the costs of Europe’s centuries-long mistreatment of the Jews must no longer fall upon an Arabic populace that bears no responsibility for that mistreatment.

Venerable Ivan, Abbot of Rila

Saint Ivan of Rila

In the Holy Orthodox Church, the nineteenth of October is the feast-day of a great Bulgarian ascetic, Saint Ivan of Rila. Ivan stood in the great tradition of Byzantine desert spirituality, but aficionados of the Celtic tradition will also find in his eremitical life many of the marks of the Welsh and Irish holy fathers – in particular his close connexion to nature and to wild animals, his love of poverty and his ambivalent and at times hostile relationship with political power. Saint Ivan is one of the most renowned and most dearly beloved Bulgarian saints. He is honoured by all Bulgarians, and as well by the Russians – including a monastery dedication in Saint Petersburg, and one church on Livingston Island off of Antarctica: the southernmost Orthodox chapel in the world.

Saint Ivan [Bg. and Rus. Иван] was born in 876 in the village of Skrino in Western Bulgaria, very shortly after the initial conversion of the South Slavs to Christianity by the Seven Saints. His parents were pious but poor villagers, and Ivan was one of two children. Both children were Christians, but it was Ivan who distinguished himself in observance: he was a filial, obedient and meek child; he loved the Church; listened attentively to the Liturgy; fasted and prayed on his own; and generally lived in the righteous fear of God. Though his brother stayed in the world, Ivan left the world. He took his part of his father’s inheritance, sold it, divided the proceeds among the poor, and entered a nearby monastery in Ruen, dedicated to Saint Dēmētrios of Thessalonikē. From there, with the abbot’s permission, he went, like unto another David going to war against Goliath, into a desert place to live alone and to struggle against the passions.

The Devil whispered in the ear of his brother, however, and his brother led the villagers to the field at Murdišta, where they found Ivan alone under an ancient oak tree. At the Evil One’s instigation, Ivan’s brother and the villagers tried to press him to leave the hermit’s path and return to the village. Instead, Ivan lifted his eyes to heaven and prayed to God for his brother, who conceded to Ivan to let him stay. Ivan had brought with him only an ox from his parents’ house for sustenance – this he returned to his brother, asking only to keep the bell around the ox’s neck, which his brother let him have. Saint Ivan took this bell and tied it around the branch of the old oak tree at Murdišta. For a long time afterward, the impression of the rope remained around the branch, signifying the world-denying faith of holy father Ivan.

Coming out from Murdišta, Saint Ivan set out for the mountainous massif of Rila. God guided him to the foot of the mountain, where he built a little hut out of twigs and dwelt therein, wearing nothing but a rag of leather, eating only wild beans and grass and drinking only from the mountain spring. He stayed here for seven months. But again he saw his brother coming from afar off, who missed him and sought his company. Ivan felt the pangs of sympathy for his brother, and he let up a heartfelt prayer to God for protection from the passions and from temptation. And God answered him: ‘Rejoice, O denizen of the desert, who are an angel in the flesh! Stand up, take your stick, and go into the place that has been prepared for you, in the cave under the mountain.’

Holy Father Ivan went into the cave, which was called Vartopen. It was dark and obscure, without sunshine. Even the wind did not touch it. Saint Ivan did not leave the cave even to gather food; instead, an angel entered the cave and brought him manna from heaven. Ivan redoubled his prayers and his vigils, wept tears of compunction which flowed without cease, and day by day increased his perfections in virtue, like a bee gathering honey.

The Devil saw Ivan strengthening himself and shining in virtue, and became bitterly jealous and angry. He tried every sort of trick to get him to leave the cave, including taking the guise of various dangerous wild animals – but nothing could shake Ivan from his firm conviction. His nephew, his brother’s son Luka, left his father’s house to seek out Ivan in the cave. Seeing him from afar off Ivan thought his appearance to be another trick of the Devil; it was only when Luka prostrated himself and asked for his uncle’s blessing in the name of Christ that Ivan was convinced he was real and allowed him to stay. But, seeing the opportunity, the Devil once again approached Ivan’s brother.

The Devil told Ivan’s brother that the holy father had taken his son into his wild dwelling-place, where there was no sun or wind, and where wild beasts attacked incessantly. He told Ivan’s brother that his son would surely perish, and would soon be eaten by them, if he had not been already. In a rage, Ivan’s brother again came to Rila, and hurled threats and reproaches against his brother, and took up a heavy stick and threatened to kill him if he did not release Luka. Again Ivan prayed to God – the God who did not forsake Daniel in the den of lions, or Saint Thekla in the fire, or the Three Holy Youths in the furnace. He begged God’s protection from the Devil and from his brother’s anger – and no sooner had his prayer ended but the Evil One was put to flight. Ivan’s brother was left, and his heart was touched. He set down his heavy stick and fell weeping at his brother’s feet, asking him to return Luka to him. Reluctantly, Saint Ivan agreed.

But Ivan prayed as they left, that Luka would not perish among the sinners, but that he would remain holy. And as father and son left down the mountain, a serpent bit Luka on the heel, and the boy died instantly. Grief-stricken, Ivan’s brother took the body of his child and went back to the saint, who asked God to accept the soul of the child and grant him æternal rest with the righteous. He then told his brother to bury Luka at Osenovo, and his tomb was thereafter turned into a shrine by Ivan. The holy father struck the serpent that had killed Luka, and turned it into a stone; this stone was supposed to have healing properties by mediæval Bulgarians.

Saint Ivan lived in the cave for another three and a half years, all the while enduring the passions of despondency and sloth and various fears which the Evil One sent to tempt him. Then he went out and found a great solitary rock shaped like a great shield, and climbed on top of it, and remained there for seven years and four months – all the while exposed to the harsh elements, wind and sun and snow; and all the while standing in vigils and prayer with tears. Again God, seeing the patience and long-suffering of His servant, sent an angel to Ivan to provide for his bodily needs.

Then the Devil began whispering into the ears of a band of brigands, a rough multitude of men in arms and armour. They came to Saint Ivan’s rock, intending to scare him off – but they could not faze him with their words. And so they climbed the rock, dragged him down from it, and beat him mercilessly, leaving him for dead. Saint Ivan did not raise his hand against his attackers, nor did he raise his roust in anger, but he endured all with joy. The folk hagiography of Holy Father Ivan tells us that his footprints and his blood can still be seen on that rock. In his weakness he prayed to God, asking forgiveness for his sins. And God sent an angel down to him with words of comfort, and he was visited by Saint John the Forerunner and by Saint John the Evangelist, who told him to return to the monastery of Saint Dēmētrios in Ruen, and to leave his walking-stick there as a ‘sign to the world’ according to God’s plan.

Saint Ivan began wandering from place to place, between wooded places and mountains in the wild parts of southwestern Bulgaria – Struma River, Vitosha Mountain – until an angel led him by the hand again to Rila. Saint Ivan had attained to such holiness at this time that even wild beasts – bears, boar, deer and birds – would approach him without fear and even eat from his hand. Farmers, shepherds and neatherds from afar off would bring their sick animals to him, and he would heal them. By this time, his name and reputation for holiness had spread far and wide, and even reached the ears of the Tsar. Tsar Petăr, who was then living in Sofia [then called ‘Sredets’], sent nine skilled hunters to scout out where Saint Ivan made his abode, so that he might pay him homage. The nine went forth, but were not able to find the saint. They were stricken with sorrow and dread, knowing that they were sworn not to return to the Tsar empty-handed. They prayed to God and cried aloud into the open air for Saint Ivan to take pity on them that they not perish on the Tsar’s account. Saint Ivan caused a small path to open up for them, which they followed until they found him.

Running out to them, Ivan asked if they truly had not eaten anything. Then an angel appeared bearing a branch with rosehips on it for food (central Bulgaria is famed for its wild roses), and these were transformed into the Holy Gifts at God’s command. Though there was one doubter among the hunters that they could be satisfied with this, the nine burly men all ate their fill and still the chalice remained half-full!

Having found the saint, the nine hunters returned to the Tsar, and told him of everything they had seen. Tsar Petăr praised God, and went himself with a great host of soldiers to see the hermit. However, the terrain was impassable to the Tsar’s hosts, and so he sent two of his young retainers out and bade them announce him to the saint. Saint Ivan told the two heralds to instruct Tsar Petăr to pitch his tent on a nearby mountain peak, and watch his rock for a plume of smoke he would send up. In this way they would be able to see each other. Indeed, that night, as Tsar Petăr looked out from his tent, he saw the smoke rising up like a great pillar into the sky – like the cloud that guided the Hebrews in the desert. In this way Petăr was able to see Saint Ivan. Petăr took a cup and filled it with gold dust, and sent it by his two retainers to Ivan. Ivan kept the cup, but poured out the gold and returned it to the Tsar, telling him that a holy man has no need of such things. He then instructed the Tsar to leave Rila on account of the treacherous terrain, and he did.

Shortly after this, Saint Ivan of Rila beheld a vision of Saint John the Evangelist, who told him to rejoice for his labours on earth were ending. Shortly after that time, on the eighteenth of August of the year 946, Saint Ivan reposed peacefully in the Lord. He had attained to the age of seventy years. Again the Tsar sent hunters into that desert place, and they were able to find no people living there, only wild beasts. But they were able to find the body of the saint on account of the stories of the prodigious healings that took place in that area. They found the saint’s incorrupt relics and reported back to the Tsar, who rejoiced that he was found. An angel visited the Tsar and instructed him to bring the relics back to Sofia, to be coffined and honoured in the Church dedicated to Saint Luke. When the Tsar’s entourage came to the place, the body of the saint arose as if of its own accord, and went effortlessly whichever way the throng turned. Once they reached Sofia, they built a reliquary and a beautiful chapel for Saint Ivan as the angel had instructed the Tsar to do, and he was given great reverence there. His relics worked wonders for people, banishing from the poor who came to visit him all manner of sickness and infirmity.

In the year 1183, King Béla II of Hungary led a campaign against Greece that invaded Bulgaria, sacked Sofia and carried off the relics of Saint Ivan. Béla had them installed in the basilica in the city of Esztergom. The relics of the saint did not cease to perform wondrous healings for the poor who believed in him. However, when the Bishop of Esztergom heard of Saint Ivan of Rila and the wonders which he was working for the Hungarian people, he scoffed and proclaimed that he had never heard of such a saint being mentioned in the ancient texts. For his unbelief, the bishop was at once stricken dumb, losing the use of his tongue as had once happened to Zechariah. Knowing the cause, the bishop fell upon his knees before the casket of Saint Ivan, kissed it, and silently begged his forgiveness. At once the bishop’s power of speech was restored to him. When Béla heard of this wonder, his heart was filled with holy dread, and at once he ordered that the casket of the saint be adorned with gold and silver, and sent back at once with honours to Sofia.

God saw fit to restore the Bulgarian Tsardom under the power of Tsar Asen I, who in Christian baptism was named ‘Ivan’. When Asen’s victorious armies entered Sofia, he beheld the casket of the blessed Saint Ivan and, having heard of his exploits and wonders, bowed down before the reliquary and kissed it. He then instructed the Patriarch of Bulgaria, Vasilii, to take the relics of Saint Ivan and translate them with honour into the capital city of Tărnovo, accompanied by a force of three hundred soldiers. More wondrous healings occurred all along the way between Sofia and Tărnovo. At the fastness of Trapezitsa, the Tsar ordered that a new church be built to house the saint. And when the procession bearing the saint reached the village of Okop outside the city, Tsar Asen himself went out to meet Patriarch Vasilii and the saint’s relics. They stayed there for seven days while the new church was completed, and then they bore Saint Ivan inside and laid him with great honour beneath the altar. This happened in the year 1195.

In the year 1469, when Tărnovo was conquered by the Ottomans, the relics of Saint Ivan were translated yet again to their next and final resting-place, which is the monastery at Rila. Even today they still work many wonders for the poor, for the sick, for those who believe: the blind again see; the lame again walk; the mute are given voice; those who suffer from handicaps and mental afflictions are made whole; and those possessed by dæmons are freed from their tormentors. It is with gratitude today that we say: Holy hermit and ascetic Ivan, who overflows with the indwelling grace of the Holy Spirit, pray unto Christ our God the Tsar of Tsars that he may have mercy upon our souls!

Apolytikion for Saint Ivan of Rila, Tone 1:

Your life was a foundation of repentance
And a model of compunction,
An image of consolation and spiritual perfection,
Equal to the angels, O venerable one.
You persevered in prayer, fasting and tears, O Father Ivan;
Intercede with Christ God for our souls.

Rila Monastery, Bulgaria

The spellbreaking power of the Elbe

Eastern Europe truly is a very different place from Western Europe, in part because many of the illusions and lies that our elites have concocted for us about political realities simply shatter and vanish upon contact with Eastern Europe. And by ‘Eastern Europe’ I do count those areas of what is more properly called Central Europe, which begins in the Elbe River basin and includes what used to be East Germany.

Take Russiagate, for example. Russiagate was always a lie – and a flimsy lie at that, but no less dangerous for being flimsy. The American journo class, and especially MSNBC, tried incredibly hard to paint Trump as an agent of Russia, someone who served primarily Russian interests, who was elected essentially at Russia’s behest. The lie was repeated so baldly and so repeatedly that the Putin-Trump ‘bromance’ and the Russian ‘love affair’ with Trump became articles of faith. The only problem is that none of it is actually true, and the Russiagate story is used to play centrist Americans for suckers. Neither Putin, nor the Russians who elected him and continue to support him, ever had much use for Trump, save for the fact that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton.

Indeed, the Pew poll that came out at the beginning of this year regarding attitudes toward Trump and America worldwide still support this view. Russians really don’t like Trump, who has a confidence rating of 20%. For comparison, Trump polls as well or better in Canada (28%) and every single Western European country surveyed – the UK (32%), the Netherlands (25%), France (20%), Spain (21%), Italy (32%) – except Germany (13%). On the other hand, despite the growing impatience with him, Russians do still love Putin, and the same Pew data gave him a rating of 73%.

But what do I mean when I say the Elbe dispels political illusions? I mean precisely this: the lie of Russiagate becomes ever more untenable the closer you actually approach Russia. Where the Russiagate story about election collusion and Trump being a Russian agent has purchase, one would expect to see equally or near-equally low approval ratings for both Trump and Russia. And indeed, in Western Europe this is generally the case, with Russia receiving approval ratings about on par with Trump there, according to Pew data collected in February this year. This is not necessarily a good indication that they ‘buy’ the Russiagate story, however. It may simply be the case that Western Europeans see both Trump and Russia as threats to their interests.

But the Elbe breaks this spell, hard, in two different ways. First of all, one sees the expected low approval ratings for Russia in Poland (33%) and the Ukraine (32%). However, both countries show markedly higher approval for Trump. Poland, in fact, is the only country in Europe where a slim majority (51%) have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, whereas in the Ukraine a plurality (44%) believes the same. Intriguing, no, that significant portions of the populations in Poland and in the Ukraine approve of Trump but do not approve of Russia? If Trump were Russia’s agent, wouldn’t one expect to see those numbers closely coincide, as they do in Western Europe?

On the other side, we have countries where Russia polls highly, but Trump does not. Bulgaria has a remarkably high degree of trust in Russia (73%), but Trump is even more unpopular there (26%) than in Canada or Italy. Likewise Slovakia – a solid majority of the country trusts Russia (60%), which is far more than can be said for Trump (34%). And finally Greece, where Russia generally (58%) and Putin personally (52%) sway a majority of the population’s trust, but where Trump (25%) is as thoroughly distrusted as in Western Europe. Even in East Germany, this same pattern seems to hold: 43% of East Germans have a favourable opinion of Russia – markedly more than in West Germany (33%). But East Germans also seem to loathe Trump every bit as much as their West German neighbours do, with an approval rating in the high teens. It’s very much the case that the closer one gets in proximity to Russia, the more ludicrous the idea that the Russian state or, even more so, the Russian people are invested in Trump seems to be. And that seems to hold regardless of what opinion one has of Russia.

One of the notable analyses that accompanied the Pew study was the degree to which European support for Trump was predicated on domestic political objectives and orientation. The new nationalist right parties tend to have far warmer feelings for Trump on average than their countrymen – even when those new nationalist right parties are also Russophobic, as in Poland and Hungary. On the other hand, warm feelings for Russia simply do not seem to be driven as much by ideological considerations, at least in Eastern Europe. As I have said before, pro-Russia parties in Eastern Europe tend to fall as much on the political left or even in the centre as on the right.

And to a certain extent, I believe ideology does matter. A historical connexion with Orthodox Christianity does seem to correlate to a certain hostility to capitalism of the sort that Trump represents, although that anti-capitalism cannot be said to be causally linked to the corpus of Orthodox doctrine or Liturgical practice (which is a shame!). These Orthodox countries do, after all, seem to have done a better job on the whole of keeping their social services and transfer mechanisms intact despite the onslaught of neoliberalism against them. The fact that the countries which are traditionally within the Orthosphere seem to be particularly cool toward Trump and warm toward Russia does seem to indicate a certain ideological distaste for what Trump represents, over-against that which Russia represents. These are taken, with good reason, to be two different things.

But what does seem to matter in these countries, is not ideology, but culture, which in some ways underlies politics more deeply than ideology does. Bulgaria has a deep and abiding connexion to its Orthodox roots, going back to the Seven Saints. Bulgarian literature has a strong Russophile streak – for example, Ivan Vazov’s famous novel! And of course there is the long history of peasant rebellion which this literature implies, which is echoed in the interwar distributist governance of Aleksandar Stamboliyski. In particularly the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, too – and Carpathian Ruthenia in particular – there was a strong streak of both peasant rebellion and cultural attachment to Russia, which has carried its echoes into modern-day Slovak politics.

It’s actually a bit sad, because the data I’m drawing on here really are hidden in plain sight. It’s just that convenience and force of habit weigh more heavily with the average consumer of news media than truth does, and therefore this intellectually-lazy and baseless association of Trump with Russia continues unabated, to be used – as it inevitably will be – as a blunt instrument and as an accusation of disloyalty against the opposite ‘side’ in American electoral politics. What a truly sorry time we live in, where even the people who claim to be on the side of ‘facts’ and ‘reason’ are simply blind to both. What few hopes I have left for sanity in the West, are actually in the East of the West… in the Elbe Basin and beyond.

The class politics of Eastern Catholicism, part 3: nobles, burghers, peasants and Brest-Litovsk

Carpathian Ruthenian oprishki, ca. 1500

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

Now, before I go and fire this blog-post off into the rushes, let me set some goals for myself here first. A lot of the historical analysis I’m going to lay out here, is going to share considerable overlap with my piece from 2017, ‘Mountain bandits, hedge-priests and the Unia’, for understandable reasons. The first goal I’m going to set is to not offer a warmed-over rewrite of that article, exploring the different class positions of Eastern Catholics versus Orthodox in the Ruthenian [or Rusin] territories. I’m hoping to focus a bit more here on the class alignments and shifts among both the Catholic clergy in Poland and the Orthodox clergy in Russia in order to broaden the scope of this discourse. That ties into my second goal: to attempt to contextualise these ecclesiological and religious-ideological disputes within the structure of world-systems theory. Again, this is in keeping with my attempt to introduce a grain of Fr Sergei Bulgakov’s quasi-materialist scepticism of ‘pious’ forms of hegemony and dominance, both contemporary and historical, into my historical thinking.

So the first necessary task, when examining this next phase of Uniatism, is to examine the relative positions, historical relations and class structures of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the Jagellonians, and their eastward neighbour, the Russian Tsardom, around the turn of the seventeenth century. To do this, we need to examine the relations of both to the evolving structure of the world-system of trade. That means taking into account the œconomic and political developments of their neighbours as well, and the shifting centre of the world-systemic core and peripheries.

When we left off in Florence in the middle of the fifteenth century, the first ‘seeds’ of proto-capitalist innovation were being sown in the northern Italian city-states, with bankers like the de’ Medici family taking a prominent rôle, in their political presence outwardly as ‘enlightened’ republicans but in practice more as oligarchs. It would be a mistake to assume, as many idealistic Whig historians do, that the ‘new sciences’ and ‘new arts’ which were assiduously promulgated in Renaissance grew out of any philosophically-driven ‘humane’ interest in the subject of man. They grew just as much out of a material need to justify the predatory practices and power-plays of these bankers, who succeeded largely by flying in the face of centuries of the Church’s moral teachings against usury. The two are, however, intimately connected. It can often be difficult to untangle, in history, where the idea precedes the material drive, and the material drive the idea, because the two reinforce each other – whether Hegel is right in a given instance, or Marx.

However, what becomes clear is that the most enthusiastic disciples of these Italian-developed ‘new sciences’ in the fields of œconomics and governance, by the middle of the sixteenth century, were the governments of England under Elizabeth I, Spain under Philip II and Charles IX and Henry III in France (themselves de’ Medicis on their mother’s side). The œconomic doctrines of mercantilism, as practised by these three powers, were the next stage in the Commercial Revolution that had begun with the Italian merchant-princes and bankers in the Big Four over four centuries previously. This new doctrine of the Commercial Revolution, the art of enriching the state, meant a scramble for new forms of œconomic exploitation and political consolidation.

But by the end of the century, England, Spain and France had to contend with the disputes of an older established thalassocratic colonial empire – that of Portugal – against a newer, leaner, meaner and more vicious one in the newly-established Dutch Republic. By the time that the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in 1596, the Republic was already in its twenty-eighth year of open revolt, during all of which time it was financing its revolt against the Habsburgs with income derived from a rapidly-expanding network of colonies and mercantile ventures, which of course included chattel slavery in kidnapped Africans (a market which had been dominated by the Portuguese for the past century). These five powers, between them, had not only begun emulating the city-states of Italy in their policy doctrines – they had also begun to not so much gently pull as yark the core of the world-system from the Eastern Mediterranean, past Italy, to the Western part. The Catholic Church, even as it began to deal with the fallout from the Reformation, had to shift its attention from the East to the West as these centres of political and œconomic power began to shift – away from fallen Constantinople (now Istanbul), and towards Paris, London and Amsterdam.

Eastern Europe began to notice this as well. The creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had a small but notable bourgeois class centred on Lublin and Krakow, deliberately modelled itself on both the Roman Republic and the Venetian one. The unique political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was an experiment in aristocratic liberty and ‘noble republicanism’ – albeit one which came at a hefty price for those below the landed gentry. The Polish state, along with the parts of the Holy Roman Empire which would come to constitute Germany, represented what one might consider a semi-periphery of the new world system. Poland-Lithuania did have an œconomy based on agricultural extraction and export – predicated on brutal exploitation of the peasantry – and a market structure which was thus partially integrated into the Western core. In this – and in its reliance on a democracy of planter-aristocrats – it somewhat resembled the export-oriented agricultural and extraction-based œconomies of the rural colonies of the American South.

The differences between the semi-peripheral Polish and Russian œconomies at this stage in capitalism’s development are subtle, but for our purposes important. The Russian class structure was always such that the military ruling class – the knyaz or the tsar plus his boyary – was never truly autochthonous; as a result, the laws governing the native Slavic peasantry suffered from a good deal of vagueness, and the ability of the nobility to exploit them was thereby limited. One can see this from the often ill-defined distinctions in early Russian law between holopy, zakupy, izhoi and so on; there was always, however, a free peasantry which could fend for itself, and had limited tax obligations to the lords. At first, the Polish class system was similar to this. However, the rise of a new bourgeois legal class in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries meant rapid erosion of the rights of the Polish peasantry. Polish historian Edward Corwin points to the Piotrków Statutes as the beginning of the entrenchment of serfdom in Poland, stripping peasants of their rights to ownership of land and their right to move, and levying punishing corvée and tax requirements on them. Notably, these statutes also removed tariffs and guaranteed free trade between Poland and merchants from the Netherlands and the Hanseatic League. These things are not unrelated.

Intriguingly, despite the Game of Thrones-style violence and cruelty of tenuously-independent Moldavia at this time, the obligations on the Moldavian peasantry were remarkably lighter and less exploitative by comparison to Poland-Lithuania: a tenth of the crop, corvée of twelve days a year, and most importantly legal freedom of movement. This relatively light and unoppressive legal environment for the rural working class would continue in Moldavia for the rest of its independent period. As a result, a significant number of Ruthenian peasants under Polish-Lithuanian rule voted with their feet and ran away into Moldavia. A similar pattern held on the border between Poland-Lithuania and Russia, with many Polish peasants fleeing into Russia, not because Russian masters were necessarily any kinder, but because they had less legal ability to extract labour and produce from them. (This would change for the worse under Peter and Catherine.) Another tactic of the Ruthenian peasants was to band together and rise up extralegally against this tightening legal régime, forming bands of oprishki, or mountain bandits.

Hora de la Aninoasa, by Theodor Aman. Oil on canvas, 19th c.

It is directly against this backdrop – colonial expansion among the Western European powers; growth of mercantilism; inroads of trade in the semi-periphery; the rise of a local bourgeoisie; the tightening of the screws on the peasants; the rise of social banditry – that the Union of Brest-Litovsk needs to be understood. Historian Andrei Nikolaevich Mouravieff, in his History of the Russian Church, writes of ‘the oppressions of the [Polish] nobles’ under Sigismund, who ‘violently appropriated to themselves the property’ of the Orthodox peasantry and black-robed clerics in the Carpathians – causing Metropolitan Onisifor to bring a complaint against the king himself. Considering this Metropolitan’s general timidity and… um, highly questionable sex life – this event is all the more striking, and it hints at the dire œconomic straits and general powerlessness of Orthodox parishes under the ‘tolerant’ Commonwealth government.

The growth of overtures toward Unia in Ruthenia during the latter half of the sixteenth century was largely the pet project of the Jesuit diplomat and polemicist (of northern Italian mercantile extraction) Antonio Possevino, who at first attempted to bring Ivan Groznyi and his realm into the Catholic Church on the terms of the Florentine Union (and to secure special privileges for Venetian merchants in Russia in the process), but was thwarted in both by the efforts of Tsar Ivan himself. Mouravieff, though his style is itself fairly polemical when he speaks of Possevino’s ‘zealous exhortations and wily policy’, is nonetheless convincing It is directly tied to a cohort of highly-educated, merchant-class seminarians in Lublin and Krakow: Piotr Skarga and Benedykt Herbest most notably. These missions took as their outward motivation the notable laxity of church discipline and personal morals among the Orthodox bishops: the Catholic Encyclopædia states that ‘the Ruthenian clergy were steeped in immorality and ignorance; the bishops made no scruple of setting their flocks an evil example, living in open concubinage, and practising the most brazen simony’. If this is overstating the case, then it is not by much. However, the Jesuit missions were more directly tied to the desire on the part of the nobility to more effectively expropriate and exploit the Ruthenian peasantry, as well as to secure the semi-periphery for a world-system that was shifting its centre to the commercial and financial cities of Western Europe. If the Jesuits could not secure Russia for Western Europe’s commercial interests, then they would do the next best thing and use their influence to freeze Russia (and the northern Tea Road) out of Europe.

Possevino, Skarga and Herbest did indeed contact the bishops Cyryl Terlecki and Hipacy Pociej in their effort to secure a Church union. Both of these bishops were from noble backgrounds and had firmer connexions with the Commonwealth state than the other bishops. They managed to procure the signatures for a union with Rome from the other bishops largely by suasion, though they were not above subterfuge, fraud and even force as it suited them when it came to procuring agreement: Mouravieff makes mention of Cyryl Terlecki ordering a monk to be beaten and robbed on the road in order to intercept a letter from Michal Rahoza to Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople. In any event, Terlecki and Pociej managed to convoke a local council in Brest where a union with Rome was signed. The pro-Union church and the Œcumenical Patriarchate promptly excommunicated each other. In the twenty years of the ascendancy of the Union of Brest, Pociej in particular sought to subject the churches under the Unia to the teaching authority of upper middle-class seminarians coming out of Lublin and Krakow.

Mouravieff is not the best source when it comes to class analysis. His is a ‘Great Men’ history; his narrative is largely oriented – as one can probably tell from what I have excerpted and paraphrased above – to the clash of personalities, of stratagems in high courts, generals’ tents and bishops’ chambers. But even so, hints of what this history looked like from the ‘bottom up’ peek through. He speaks of the ‘persecutions’ of Orthodox in the Commonwealth and how they were ‘deprived of their civil rights’ in general terms. He describes how the Orthodox clerics and laity in the Commonwealth ‘solemnly assembled in a private house, because they could not obtain the use of a Church’. As seen above, he occasionally speaks of expropriation and subjugation of the peasantry. He speaks of how Orthodox schoolmasters – generally of peasant, not merchant, backgrounds – had to depend on the selective and altogether inadequate patronage and protection of Orthodox nobles. More directly, though, he speaks of the expropriation and privatisation of Orthodox monastery lands at Hipacy Pociej’s orders, something one normally associates with the abuses of the Protestantising Henry VIII. He also makes passing reference to the more violent resistance of the oprishki and the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Unia. Though this is not his focus, what emerges from Mouravieff’s narrative is a clear distinction of class interest between the Unia and the Orthodox Church in the Commonwealth’s Ruthenian territories.

Asymmetrical warfare in the Carpathian Mountains

Jesuit historians like the late Robert Taft ludicrously insist, in a theatrical form of handwashing worthy of Pilate, that the impetus for ‘uniatism’ came largely from the Ruthenian bishops themselves, when the sources that he himself cites in fact claim otherwise (including Possevino’s own writings). Taft then follows this up with what should be recognised as a breathtakingly-fallacious tu quoque: apparently the uses of force against Catholics by Tsars and Soviet premiers, and the existence of the twee boutique phenomenon of ‘Western Rite Orthodoxy’, are somehow enough to balance the scales of historical wrong. So far from offering a ‘healing of memory’, it seems that Taft’s contribution to this dialogue was merely to offer another list of recriminations without any meaningful overarching analysis.

In recognition of this: no, the Russian state’s hands are not clean; nor are those of the Orthodox hierarchs. We see indictments of Orthodox wrongdoing clearly enough within Orthodox historical accounts, which Taft ridiculously accuses tout court of ‘victimhood pretense’! As mentioned above, the differences in class structure between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth state and the Tsarist Russian state were largely differences of nuance. One was a ‘noble republic’ of planters; the other a burgeoning autocracy – both had large social gaps which were enforced with sanguine brutality. But the nuances in these gaps were not meaningless to the people at the bottom of the social ladder, just as they were not meaningless to the people designing œconomic and religious policy in these states.

Any real ‘healing of memory’ must begin and end with truth, not with diplomatic approximations of truth. As such, in this case it needs to begin with a frank, unapologetic analysis of how capitalism emerged within the world-system, how it dragged the core of the world-system away from Asia and into the Atlantic, and how it made use of existing ideological supports – including the ones within the Western European Christian world – to siphon wealth away from the periphery and direct it to the core. This may seem a Hegelian tack to take, rather than Marxist. But even those on the liberation-theology end of the scale should be able to agree that we cannot view all instances of civil force in religious questions in the strictly value-neutral and blandly panglossian terms that Taft, Guzniak and other would-be gatekeepers of this memory demand. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Tsardom may have been neighbours and may even have been similar in social structure, but their internal dynamics and their relations to the rest of the world show some important differences. The actions of a semi-peripheral state like the Commonwealth, seeking to integrate itself and its territories into the emerging dynamo of capitalism, cannot be equated to the actions of a semi-peripheral state seeking to countervail against that dynamo, as the last Rurikoviches and the first Romanovs before Peter tried imperfectly to do. Even more so: the retaliatory violence of the people at the bottom, including the Ruthenian Orthodox oprishki of this era, must not be equated to the force of the state and the bourgeois class exploiting them.

Holy and Right-Believing Prince Ştefan III of Moldova

Saint Ştefan ‘cel Mare’ of Moldova

Today, the twelfth of July, is the day of the canonisation of Saint Ştefan, the fifteenth-century voivode of Moldavia, who preserved the territorial integrity and Orthodox faith of the territory of Moldavia – that is to say, Moldova – from onslaughts by all three surrounding powers: the Ottoman Empire, Poland and Hungary. His reputation among historians is mixed. But he is highly regarded and treasured by both Romanian and Moldovan historians, particularly after the fall of communism, for his preservation of Moldavian independence amidst the depredations of the great powers around him. He was glorified by the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992; his feast-day is the second of July.

Ştefan Muşat [also in English Stephen, cognomen ‘cel Mare’ or ‘the Great’] was born to Bogdan II of Moldova and his wife Maria Oltea sometime in the mid-1400s; the year is unclear but it was probably sometime before 1440. He had three brothers – Ioachim, Ioan and Christea – and two sisters – Sorea and Maria. He was a very young man when his father seized the throne of Moldavia by force, with the aid of the peasant leader of Hungary Hunyadi János. Bogdan II made his young son his heir and co-ruler, while swearing fealty to Hunyadi as suzerain. However, one of Bogdan’s siblings, Petru Aron, assassinated him in October 1451 and took the throne for himself, being supported by the Kingdom of Poland – forcing the eleven-year-old Ştefan to flee Moldavia for Hungary.

Ştefan Muşat, as a young man, served as a retainer of the (in)famous Vlad Țepeș ‘the Dragon’ around the time he became ruler of Wallachia. Vlad thereafter lent his assistance to young Ştefan when he decided to retake his kingdom in 1456. At the head of an army, 6,000 strong, consisting largely of peasants from the south of the country, Ştefan charged headlong into his country and confronted his uncle Petru Aron at Doljești and Orbic in April 1457, routing his forces and causing him to flee for Poland.

The young Ştefan, most likely not yet being 20 years of age, was crowned as voivode of Moldavia on the 13^th of September that year by Metropolitan Teoctist. According to tradition, this took place in an assembly of boyars and clergy on the Plain of Direptate, near to the battlefield where he had fought and defeated Petru Aron. Teoctist, being Serbian-educated and Serbian-consecrated, was apparently one of the few Romanian clergymen who had not approved of the Union of Florence (and thus had significant sway among the Moldavian people). Saint Ştefan emphasised the Orthodox and religious elements of his title, in part to emphasise his connexion to the recently-fallen Orthodox Constantinople.

Ştefan wasted no time in chasing down his usurping uncle into Poland, signing the treaty of Overchelăuţi with the Polish king the following year, on the understanding that Casimir IV would not give his political or military support to Petru Aron. Petru Aron thereafter fled to Hungary, and Ştefan was forced to cede significant degrees of his sovereignty to Poland in exchange for protection from Hungary’s king Hunyadi Mátyás. Subsequent years saw Ştefan mount several campaigns against Hungary in order to protect the borders of Moldavia. During Ştefan’s campaigns against Hungary, in 1465, he managed to recapture Chilia, for which he traded with Poland for some of his northern territory, reëstablishing the historical boundary between Poland and Moldavia.

Both Hungary and Moldavia used disgruntled elements of each other’s landowning classes as military supports in their campaigns, one against the other. Thus, it’s not surprising that Ştefan used his new position to consolidate the power of the voivode over the boyars. Ştefan ruled in a distinctly autocratic manner, and did not flinch from using his friend Vlad Țepeș’s methods of juridical terror and execution – including impalement – against landowners and boyars who defied him. He suppressed Romani and Tatars in his realm, and undertook particularly heavy-handed and cruel administrative actions to prevent them from posing military threats to his power. He welcomed Armenians, Germans and other immigrants to settle in the underdeveloped agricultural regions of Moldova; however, he ruthlessly expropriated property from Jews under his sway and occasionally levied tariffs against merchants who crossed his borders. His policies of centralisation and protectionism, combined with selective open-door policy for immigrants and punitive actions against the nobility, ended up expanding both the powers and the military responsibilities of the Moldovan peasantry.

He expropriated a great deal of land from the more stubborn boyars. Of this land, he gave much of it to the Orthodox Church, and thus earned a certain reputation for religious devotion – and encouraged his loyal boyars to do the same. Over a dozen stone churches were built in Moldavia on his orders, most of these featuring a uniquely-Romanian architectural style which mixed Byzantine and Western principles. He commissioned the consecration of the Putna Monastery, whose votive church would become the resting place for himself and his family, and which is today located in northeastern Romania. He also contributed heavily to a body of Romanian Liturgical literature and music, which was – intriguingly – transcribed in the Cyrillic script. He had, it seems, an affinity for Slavic cultural expressions.

Saint Ştefan repulsed an invasion by Tatars in 1469, and another attempted coup by his treacherous uncle the following year. Capturing Petru Aron along with several of his supporters, Ştefan had them executed, thus putting a decisive end to the Moldavian succession issue. Once this was done, and having nothing more to fear from Hungary, Ştefan turned his attention to the threat from Turkey and the Tatars to his East, on the Black Sea coast. He sparred several times with the Ottoman vassal of Bessarabia, Radu ‘cel Frumos’. When the Ottomans invaded Moldavia in 1475, the holy voivode led a coalition of Christian kings, including those of Poland and Hungary, to expel the Turks from Moldavia and to dethrone Radu once and for all. Ştefan declared Moldavia to be the ‘Gate to Christendom’, and applied to both the Papacy and to the Venetians for help – which, as might be expected, never materialised. Upon the release of Vlad Țepeș in 1476, the Impaler launched a campaign to free Wallachia from the Ottomans – which ended in his death. Ştefan, on a rare occasion, found himself militarily defeated by the Turks, and was forced to flee for safety into Poland. However, with two of his vassals holding firmly in their fastenings, the voivode was able to return to his homeland that same year.

A power vacuum in Wallachia consumed much of the Moldavian monarch’s attention for the following years – though ultimately, after several failed attempts on Ştefan’s part to intervene in the succession, Wallachia is ceded to Ottoman suzerainty. Several treaties Ştefan was forced to sign between 1479 and 1484 ceded considerable degrees of sovereignty to Poland and Hungary in exchange for protection from the victorious Ottomans; however, the Ottomans under Bayezid II still attack and take the valuable port towns of Chilia and Cetatea Albă. Poland ultimately betrays Moldavia to the Ottomans, prompting Ştefan to again turn to Hungary. On the disputed succession of Władysław Jagiełło to the Hungarian throne, Ştefan – though effectively a supporter of Władysław – was again able to effectively play Poland and Hungary off of each other in order to assert Moldavian independence.

Towards the end of his life, in 1499, Saint Ştefan was finally able to leverage the strategic location of Moldavia and the political clout he carried in both Polish and Hungarian courts to force a settlement that would forge a Christian anti-Ottoman alliance – in which Moldavia would be considered a full and independent member. Even so, the continued Ottoman pressure on Moldavia would mean that Ştefan as well as his heirs would continue essentially paying protection money to the Ottomans in exchange for recognition of their sovereignty.

Ştefan married four times: first, to a woman named Mărica (who bore him a son, Alexandru); second, to Evdokia of Kiev; third, to Maria Palaiologina of Doros; and fourth, to Maria Voichița of Wallachia. In addition to his wives he also consorted with a number of women outside, claiming paternity of at least two illegitimate sons. His fourth wife would bear him a son, Bogdan [called ‘cel Chior’ or ‘the One-Eyed’], whom he would raise to take the throne after his death. Saint Ştefan, as the leader of a small state wedged between several large and powerful ones (much like the Kazakh khan Abylaı), skilfully played Poland, Hungary and the Ottomans against each other. His strategic acumen allowed him to make a successful bid for Moldavian independence, and his personal knack for nipping political plots in the bud and ensuring his personal longevity allowed Moldavia a degree of stability, order and internal peace which lasted through the reigns of his son and his grandchildren; and which it seldom had before or since.

Ştefan III makes for a complicated saint, very similar in character to Saint Éadgár the Frithsome of England. His sex life was – to say the least – not particularly saintly, though his fealty to Orthodox doctrine is past doubt, and there are interesting indications of a kind of sæcular asceticism in his life. For example: he did not hold a permanent court, and even in peacetime he liked to live in tents and sleep on the ground. He also prayed and mourned even over the graves of his enemies, and kept a rule of fasting and personal penance after battles. He was also notable for his personal generosity to monastics both at home and in places like the Holy Mountain, as well as to poor and needy people inside his kingdom. Saint Ştefan’s rule was indeed notoriously heavy-handed; however, he was a remarkably astute and tenacious political leader, one who was wholly committed to the defence of his folk and of his Church. The Catholic Pope Sixtus IV described him as an ‘athlete of Christ’. Particularly toward the end of the Cold War, he came to be seen as a heroic figure who is revered by all Romanians and Moldovans. In modern-day Moldova, particularly on the political left, he is considered to be the founder of the state, being the author of Moldovan independence from foreign powers – both Christian and non-Christian. Holy and great prince Ştefan, steadfast defender of the Moldavian land and people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Ştefan of Moldavia, Tone 1:

Fearless defender of the True Faith
And protector of the land of your forefathers,
Great founder of holy churches and monasteries,
O Prince Ştefan, pray to Christ God
To deliver us from our needs and sorrows.

Coat of arms of Ştefan cel Mare

Holy New Greatmartyr Ioan of Suceava

Saint Ioan of Suceava

The twenty-fourth of June is the feast day of another of the great (relatively) recent Orthodox witnesses among the Muslims, Saint Ioan the New of Suceava. The fate of this Black Sea martyr was tied up, intriguingly, with both Venetian greed and Islâmic pride during an age after the Crusades had wound down and the Black Death was nearly on Europe’s doorstep. He is primarily venerated in Romania and Moldova.

Saint Ioan [Gk. Ἰωάννης, Eng. John] was born around the year 1300 in the city of Trebizond in the Pontus, on the northern coast of Anatolia; however, his hagiography also states that his ancestral hometown (‘родного города’) was Belgorod-on-the-Dneister, also called by its Gagauz name of Akerman and its Romanian name of Cetatea Albă, which was at that time a part of the Principality of Moldavia. It seems reasonable, then, to assume that his parentage was what we would now call Romanian. Trebizond was, naturally, a shipping city, and Ioan’s father made his living trading on the sea. He taught his son in his mercantile profession, in which Ioan soon joined him. Ioan was, however, firm in his Orthodox faith and merciful to the poor.

At one time, when he was on business, he had to sail on a ship bound from Cetatea Albă, which was at that time under the control of the Muslim Tatars. During his voyage, Saint Ioan became involved in discussions with the captain, a Venetian merchant named Reiz, and these discussions sometimes ranged into matters of faith. Saint Ioan’s religious learning was profound and motivated by deep love, and he often came off the better in these discussions with Reiz. As a result, the Venetian’s heart grew poisoned by jealousy, and he harboured a grudge against Ioan, deciding at last to take his revenge on him.

Upon landing in Cetatea Albă on the return voyage, the Venetian announced to the Tatar burgomaster of the city that Ioan intended to renounce the Orthodox faith. The burgomaster, who was excited by this news, invited Ioan to a lavish feast, at which the burgomaster and his attendants began to blaspheme and encourage Ioan to do the same. But, as our Saviour said in the Gospel of Saint Mark: ‘But when they shall lead you, and deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.’ And so, Saint Ioan, remembering this verse, prayed in the depths of his heart, calling upon the Lord’s name for help. And thus he found the divinely-given courage and understanding to reject the claims of the wicked men, and firmly confess himself to be a Christian.

Outraged, the burgomaster ordered Ioan to be beaten. His tormentors took rods and beat him so severely that the flesh was torn from his bones all over his body, and even his bones were shattered. The holy martyr of God did not cry out or curse, but instead thanked God for finding him worthy to shed blood for Him and to wash away his sins. The Tatars then bound Saint Ioan in heavy iron chains and dragged him off to prison, where the burgomaster called him the next day. Saint Ioan, despite his wounds, had a bright and cheerful expression upon his face. Again he was told to renounce faith in Christ, and again Saint Ioan fearlessly refused, and denounced the burgomaster as an instrument of the Evil One. Saint Ioan was again beaten with rods and sharp canes, such that his wounds were opened afresh and even his internal organs could be seen.

The people who were assembled there could not bear to see this torture visited upon the martyr, and they began to raise their voices indignantly against the burgomaster’s inhumanity in so viciously tormenting a defenceless prisoner. But the burgomaster’s heart was hardened. He ordered the beatings to cease, but then he had the martyr lashed by his ankles to the tail of a wild horse, who was then set loose to drag him through the streets of Cetatea Albă. The horse dragged him through the Jewish quarter, where the residents mocked him and jeered at him and threw stones at him. Finally one of the people there grabbed a knife, overtook the horse when it had paused, and severed the head of the saint.

The body and the head of the greatmartyr lay in the street for the rest of the day, and none of the city’s Christians dared to come and claim his remains. But when night fell, a pillar of light shone brightly over his body, and a great multitude of burning lamps were seen to hang over him. Three men robed in light were seen singing the Psalter and burning a censer over the saint’s body. One of the Jews, believing that the Christians had come to claim their own, took a bow and aimed an arrow at the three men, but he was rendered motionless by the unseen power of the Almighty.

With the coming of dawn, the apparition of the three men disappeared, but the shooter continued to stand affixed where he was. The people came and questioned him about what had happened; and he told them about the vision he had seen and God’s punishment upon him, and so he was freed from his invisible bonds. Only after this did the burgomaster give his permission to the Christians to bury the greatmartyr’s remains, which was at a local church. This happened around the year 1330.

As for the captain Reiz, he repented of his sins and went to the martyr’s tomb to ask his forgiveness and to take his body back with him to Venice where he might be venerated by fellow-Christians. However, Saint Ioan appeared to the priest of the church where he was buried, and thus the plan to remove him was prevented – but he was translated into the altar, from which the relics worked many great life-saving wonders. Seventy years later, Metropolitan Joseph of Moldavia, learning of the wonderworking relics of the saint, asked of the Prince Alexandru ‘cel Bun’ Mușat that they be transferred to Suceava, which was at that time the capital of the Principality of Moldavia. Alexandru sent an embassy of noblemen, clergy and soldiers to Cetatea Albă to claim the relics and take them back to Suceava. As the relics approached the city in their procession, the overjoyed populace of the city all turned out to greet the holy martyr, who was laid with great honour in the Mirăuți Basilica of Saint George. This happened on the second of June of 1402, which is also kept as a commemoration of the great saint. The wondrous healings continued at the saint’s tomb, and he has since been considered the patron saint of the Moldovan people.

In 1589, the relics of Saint Ioan were transferred to the new Metropolitan Cathedral on the orders of Bogdan ‘cel Orb’, the son of Saint Ştefan. The people prayed to Saint Ioan during an invasion of Moldavia by the Tatars following the Magnate Disputes in 1622, when the city of Suceava was under threat. The Metropolitan Anastasius of Crimea held an all-night vigil and urged the faithful to pray for God’s mercy upon their city. He led the relics in procession around the Church three times, and were on their way to hide them in the castle, but the oxen leading the cart with the saint’s relics refused to budge. However, when morning came, a torrential downpour began, flooding the Suceava River and rendering it impassible to the invading Tatars, who retreated in confusion. The saint’s intercessions spared the city.

In 1686, the Polish Army under John III Sobieski, during one of its expeditions against the Ottomans, invaded Moldavia in an attempt to gain a Black Sea port. They plundered Suceava in the process, robbing the churches of many of their holy objects including the relics of Saint Ioan and Metropolitan Saint Dosoftei of Suceava. These were brought back to Sobieski’s capital at Zhovkva, where they stayed for ninety-seven years. There they continued to work wonders, both for the Orthodox and for the Catholics who prayed for the saint’s intercession.

They were restored, with great joy among the saint’s native people, to Moldavia on the thirteenth of September, 1783, thanks to the tireless labours of Bishop Dosoftei of Rădăuți. Upon their return, the relics were taken all over Moldavia for nearly three months, during which time many people came out to greet their saint in a spirit of love. At last the relics were translated again to Suceava and interred at the Metropolitan Cathedral. Among the many and inexhaustible miracles ascribed to Saint Ioan, one in particular stands out: in 1898 a certain noblewoman stole a particle from the saint’s finger to carry back with her; however, her carriage would not budge until she had repented her theft and returned the relic to its rightful place. The holy saint continues to work wonders for the people of Moldova, showing particular favour to the blind, to the deaf and to the paralysed. There were accounts of wondrous healings attributed to him as late as the 1960s, related to us in the Paterikon of Archimandrite Joannicius (Belan). The feast-day of Saint Ioan is kept on the second of June among the Greeks, and on the twenty-fourth of June among the Romanians and Moldovans. Holy new martyr Ioan, fearless confessor of the true faith, pray unto Christ our God for us that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion of Saint Ioan of Suceava, Tone 4:

Your life on earth was well-governed, O sufferer,
With almsgiving and with tears and prayers unceasing,
And again embarking upon travails worthy of man,
You rebuked the unbelief of the Tatars.
In this way you give strength to Christ’s Church
And all Christians praise you,
O Ioan, the everlastingly-remembered!

Mirăuți Basilica of Saint George, Suceava, Romania

Venerable Pafnutii, Abbot of Borovsk

Saint Pafnutii of Borovsk

Today is International Labour Day, the first of May, the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair in Chicago. There is going to be a strike for hazard pay and safer working conditions in several major cities across the United States, staged by essential food service, retail and tech industry workers who are compelled to continue working during the pandemic. To those seeking recognition and a better work environment: I stand in solidarity with you and support your struggle!

It is also the commemoration in the Orthodox Church of Prophet Jeremiah who preached of just wages for the workman and comfort for the orphan and widow; of 79 monastic martyrs at Sînâ’ and at-Tûr in Ægypt; of the holy queens Berhte of Kent and Tamara the Great of Georgia. It is also the feast-day of a great monastic saint of Russia, the venerable Saint Pafnutii of Borovsk. Saint Pafnutii was the spiritual father and tutor of the future abbot, monastic teacher and social-justice advocate Saint Iosif of Volokolamsk.

Saint Pafnutii [or Paphnutius], in the world Parfenii [or Parthenius], was born in Kudinovo in the year 1395. Pafnutii’s grandfather was a Tatar, a basqaq (or ‘tax collector’) of the Golden Horde under Batu khaghan. When the Russians rose up in a revolt against the Horde, they took Ivan’s father hostage, and instead of killing him they offered him the choice of taking on the Orthodox faith. Pafnutii’s grandfather took this option and was baptised in a bathhouse, taking the Christian name of Martin.

Ivan, the son of the baptised Tatar Martin, had a homestead in Kudinovo which he inherited from his father, and there married a Russian woman named Photini. The two of them were poor, but they honoured God. And even with what little they had, they were still renowned for giving with an open hand to those who had less, much like the widow at the Temple with her two small coins. Photini became pregnant and bore a son, whom they called Parfenii. Even as a small child Parfenii was of a mild and sweet temper, and had a character which inclined toward the Church. He wanted to study the Holy Scriptures, and his father allowed him to do so at the nearby monastic school in Borovsk. As he studied the Scriptures, he not only learned to read and gained this worldly knowledge, but he also grew in character: his hagiography tells us that in this study he became meek, humble and chaste, not entering into idle chatter or evil gossip, but instead speaking only when he had something meaningful to say.

When young Parfenii was twelve years of age, he begged his parents’ leave from home to go and study full-time at Borovsk. Though Ivan and Photini were unhappy to part from their beloved son, they saw how earnest he was and let him go. He went to the Monastery of the Protection of the Mother of God on the outskirts of Borovsk. There the abbot placed the young lad under the discipline of an elderly, blind priestmonk named Nikita, who had himself been under obedience to the great Saint Sergii the Wonderworker of Radonezh. Father Nikita had himself been an abbot in Serpukhov, but had given the office to another and retired to Borovsk on account of his great old age and failing eyesight. As a novice under Father Nikita, Parfenii spent seven years in obedience. He served the old man faithfully and in a spirit of love, also acquiring the monastic virtues. At the end of that seventh year, the Abbot Markell of the Protection Monastery tonsured Parfenii and bestowed upon him the monastic name of Pafnutii.

As a monk he spent twenty years further, glorifying Christ by working with his hands, struggling against the passions, and obeying whatever his brother-monks desired him to do. When Abbot Markell reposed in the Lord in the year 1434, the brothers of Protection Monastery began to desire that Pafnutii be appointed as his successor. Pafnutii was unwilling, but he was prevailed upon by the prince of Borovsk, Simeon Vladimirovich, as well as the Metropolitan of all Rus’, Saint Photius, to accept the abbacy. Indeed, it was Saint Photius himself who ordained Pafnutii a priest and bestowed the office of rector upon him.

Abbot Pafnutii was blessed with keen insight, and he laboured hard not only in the offices of the church and in private prayers at night, but also to care for his flock of monks. It happened early in his abbacy that he had occasion to send one of the young monks to the village for supplies. In the village this young monk met a pretty girl and they fell into fornication. That night, Abbot Pafnutii dreamed about a delightful orchard full of fruit-trees, but as he was delighting in them, he noticed that one of the fruit-trees had cracked, split in two, and fell to the ground in front of him. Distressed, the abbot heaved up the fallen trunk, bound it together and began to fill in the earth around it. But the tree fell over again. Pafnutii did not give up, but each time took the fallen splinters of the tree and placed them in the orchard earth, no matter how many times it fell over.

When at last he awoke, Abbot Pafnutii began to understand what his dream meant. The orchard was his monastery, and the fruit-trees were his monks. The fallen tree was a brother who had sinned. It was not long after that the brother who had fell into fornication with the girl in the village returned from his errand. Appearing before the abbot, his face was darkened with shame and grief at his sin. The abbot asked him what was wrong, but the young brother could not speak, neither could he look into Saint Pafnutii’s eyes. But Pafnutii – neither angry nor condemning – took pity on the boy, drew him out from the presence of the other monks, and began to take patient counsel with him. After Pafnutii’s gentle but stern admonitions, the boy confessed to what he had done.

Abbot Pafnutii gave the boy a long regimen of penitence to perform. However, he continued to keep a close watch on him, because the tree in his dream had fallen and needed replanting more than once. Fornication was one thing; it was far harder for Pafnutii to cure in the young monk the sin of despair. But through Abbot Pafnutii’s patient and gentle guidance, which forbade the young monk from either shirking his penance or from heaping upon himself further damnation in self-reproach, he was able to steer the youngster back onto the correct path. In this way, Pafnutii was able to be a wise doctor for the spiritual needs of each of his monks, and a good shepherd who kept his lambs out of the jaws of the ravening wolf.

Saint Pafnutii had been abbot thirteen years at Protection Monastery, when he fell into a grave bodily illness from which it seemed he would not recover. He took the great-schema upon himself, not hoping for any worldly relief. The affliction which he suffered was not of natural origins, and it left him as quickly as it had come. On the very day that he renounced his abbacy – the twenty-third of April, the feast of Saint George the Greatmartyr in 1444 – he was cured of his disease. He left the monastery, taking with him one disciple, and settled in a densely-wooded spot two miles distant from the Protection Monastery, where the rivers Protva and Ister’ma meet. The new schemamonk and his disciple had thought to live there in a silent hermitage as hesychasts, but neither was this the will of God.

The brethren of Protection Monastery, having discovered where their beloved former abbot had gone, gathered around him and fashioned cells for themselves in the place where he had established himself, and sought again to be under obedience to him. They asked his permission to build an oratory and a chapel, which they dedicated to the Nativity of the Holy Theotokos. And since he could not forbid them from doing so, instead Pafnutii blessed the work and consecrated the temple himself, assisted by the saintly Metropolitan Iona of Moscow himself.

Prior to this, however, Saint Pafnutii was given a test of his faith. The abbot and the metropolitan had, to put it mildly, not gotten off on the right foot. The Metropolitan had been consecrated by the synod of bishops of Moscow in 1448 – without the approval of Constantinople. To be sure, there were some fairly strong extenuating circumstances, but Abbot Pafnutii was a stickler for the canonical order and thus refused either to offer congratulations to the new Metropolitan Iona, or to call him by his new title. As a result, Pafnutii was called to Moscow to answer for himself, and when he arrived there he was clapped in irons and thrown into gaol. The new Metropolitan went in person to visit the Abbot in gaol, and there followed between them – as Saint Iosif recounts – a tense and at times heated discussion. In the end, though, the two of them were reconciled. Saint Pafnutii came to understand the hard position of the Russian bishops, and acknowledged Iona as Metropolitan. For his part, Metropolitan Iona knelt at the feet of Abbot Pafnutii, asked his forgiveness (and was given it) for the rough treatment he had meted upon him, personally unshackled him, gave him gifts, kissed him and sent him back to his monastery in peace.

The new Nativity of the Theotokos Monastery was beset with some problems: most of them related to engineering. The church, being built along the banks of two rivers, was exposed to attack from one side. The monks built a fence there, but it was nowhere close to sufficient. They began to think of diverting the river, and so they constructed an artificial causeway to wall off a portion of the Ister’ma. After they had done this, however, the river water was no longer fit for drinking, and monks had to be sent far away to fetch drinking water. They complained of this to Abbot Pafnutii, who went off by himself, walked over the causeway and rested under a certain tree, praying to God to help him find a solution to their water problems. At once, beneath that tree, a holy well of pure, clean, drinkable water erupted, which supplied the needs of the monastery.

The monastery faced other problems – political ones. It so happened that the heir of Prince Simeon of Borovsk was a proud and overbearing knyaz named Vasilii Yaroslavich. This boasting, strutting man would come into the abbey and give orders to the monks, and the Abbot would patiently remonstrate with him, saying: ‘God is God and Cæsar is Cæsar’. Vasilii Yaroslavich was not at all pleased with the construction of the Nativity Monastery so close to the Protection Monastery of which his family had been patrons, and still less that many of the monks of the Protection Monastery were leaving to be under their former Abbot. He began to concoct in his mind a scheme to rid himself of the troublous Abbot Pafnutii. Vasilii gave orders to violent ruffians under his employ to set fire to the new monastery and drive the monks out. But these ruffians, whenever they drew near the monastery, saw the brothers gladly labouring and building in the forests for the sake of their beloved Abbot, and singing sweetly to themselves in praise of Christ, and they could not bring themselves to do violence upon them. For these men, violent and greedy though they were, feared God, and their hearts were moved.

Then Vasilii Yaroslavich sent Ermolai. Ermolai was a Tatar who had taken on baptism but had not renounced his violent ways. He went to the monastery in stealth, with a brand in one hand and a sword in the other, ready to set the monastery ablaze and slay any, monk or novice, who tried to flee. But God struck him blind, and instead of stealthily attacking the monastery he fumbled in an unseeing rage over the grounds, until at last he was found and brought before Saint Pafnutii. Pafnutii shared Ermolai’s Tatar heritage and knew the Tatar tongue, and so he spoke to Ermolai joyfully in Tatar speech, and called him by his name. Ermolai, whose heart was touched by hearing his mother tongue spoken, knelt before the saint and touched his head to the earth, confessing to him everything: what he had planned to do in the monastery, and who had sent him. Saint Pafnutii forgave him, and prayed to Christ for him, and no sooner was this done than the Lord restored Ermolai’s sight. Ermolai left the monastery in peace and did nothing to harm any of the monks.

At this time, the Russian lands were attacked by the Tatar lord Mäxmüt Khan [also Makhmutek or Mamotyak in Russian sources], the son of Oluğ Möxämmät. The Russian princes, who were ever at odds and quarrelling amongst themselves, could not muster a force sufficient to repel this attack: the few who met Mäxmüt Khan in battle were led by the Grand Duke Vasilii Vasil’evich of Suzdal, and among them was none other than Vasilii Yaroslavich of Borovsk! Mäxmüt took the Grand Duke and all his men captive in battle, and demanded that the people of Russia pay yasaq in compensation for his release.

Being kept in bonds in the tents of the Tatars, Vasilii Yaroslavich remembered his sins against Abbot Pafnutii, and began to feel remorse for what he had done. He prayed to God and promised that he would reconcile with Pafnutii, if ever he received his life and his freedom. God heard his prayer, and Abbot Pafnutii went among his monks, among the rich and even among ordinary people trying to raise the yasaq necessary to pay off Mäxmüt Khan and release Vasilii Vasil’evich and all his nobles. Even if he was able to raise a kopek from a poor peasant, he was thankful for this and added that peasant to his prayers; and for this reason it was called the ‘kopek ransom’. The Tatar Khan was good to his word, and when he had received the yasaq he released the Russian princes back to their lands. When the Prince of Borovsk returned home, the first thing he did was to go to Abbot Pafnutii and beg his forgiveness for the many sins he had committed. This the abbot gave gladly.

At one time the fast of Great Lent was nearing an end, and the monastery had no fish with which to celebrate the Lord’s Pascha. Both the brothers and the lay workers at the monastery were grieved by this. But Abbot Pafnutii told them: ‘Do not grieve for this, my brothers, and do not tempt God. The All-Merciful Lord who made us and brought light into the whole world by His Pascha, will comfort us, His workers, in our griefs. And He will give unto those who fear him an overabundance of good things!’

As it turned out, these words would not go long unfulfilled by the All-Good and All-Wise Treasure of Blessings! On Holy Saturday, the sexton of the oratory went out to the holy well by the Ister’ma to draw water for the Pascha Liturgy, and he happened to cross the river as he was going over the causeway. There he saw leaping and playing in the river, more freshwater whitefish than he had ever seen gather in one place! This was because the river had swollen with the spring rains, and the fish had taken refuge in the still waters near where the monks had dug. The sexton hurried back to tell Saint Pafnutii about this, and the Abbot, giving thanks to God, told the lay brothers to go with nets and go to catch whitefish for the Paschal feast. The fishermen brought back so many of the slender silver swimmers that both monasteries – Nativity and Protection – had enough fish for all the monks to eat fish at every meal during Bright Week! What they did not eat themselves, they distributed amongst the poor in Borovsk.

By wonders such as this the name of Abbot Pafnutii became known throughout the Russian lands, and many eager young people were drawn to him to benefit from his wisdom and kindness. These included sæcular and married young men and women as well as those who would become monks. His most famous disciple, Ivan Sanin, came to him when he was twenty years old – the same age Pafnutii had been when he was tonsured by Abbot Markell. Saint Pafnutii placed the young Ivan under a discipline before giving him the tonsure, and the monastic name of Iosif.

Part of the young Ivan Sanin’s discipline was – much like Pafnutii’s own novitiate had been – caring for an elderly monk. In Ivan’s case, this monk was named Konstantin. Konstantin was nearing the end of his earthly life, and Abbot Pafnutii sent Ivan to care for him. The young novice went to the elderly monk’s cell to pray with him after the morning devotions, and then left him to attend to other duties. As he was passing by the abbot’s cell, Pafnutii came out and told him: ‘Someone was praying and I heard a voice that told me that the old man Konstantin had gone to the Lord. I came out to see who it was and I saw you.’

Ivan, taken aback by his abbot’s address, replied: ‘I’ve just come from Konstantin. He is still alive.’

The abbot then sent him back to Konstantin to make sure. When Ivan returned there, he found that Konstantin had already reposed peacefully in the Lord.

There was another elder who had lived a long time in the monastery by the name of Evfemii. Evfemii had spent much of his life imitating the life of his abbots, and particularly Father Pafnutii, and Christ had given him the gift of tears. He also had a certain gift of foresight. At the time there were two brother-monks in the choir who were given to an impure attraction to each other; and for this reason Saint Pafnutii had cause to rebuke them several times.

At one time during the Liturgy, Evfemii saw the two of them singing in the choir; and during that time he beheld in a vision, a horrendous devil assault these two monks with hooks and weapons of iron, hoping to drag them off out of the choir. Time and again the devil assaulted them, and time and again his weapons were deflected, harmlessly, off the bodies of the two young monks, who kept their place in the choir. Evfemii noticed this, and understood that whenever the brothers inclined to their forbidden attraction, the devil was able to hook them with his weapons. Whenever the brothers resisted the thought, the devil’s weapons fell away useless. Evfemii stood up and began to read from the Holy Gospel, and the devil could not bear to listen and disappeared. Again the devil came and attacked them, but he was defeated by the Cherubic Hymn. Again the devil came and attacked them, but he was defeated and banished at the Hymn to the Theotokos and the presentation of the Gifts.

At the end of the Liturgy, Evfemii took Saint Pafnutii aside and told him what he had seen concerning the two monks. Saint Pafnutii called the two monks to him and had Evfemii repeat the story; and the two monks were both admonished and heartened by what they heard. Gently the saintly abbot told the monks not to entertain the thought, but instead to take counsel in confession and so uproot them from the heart.

The monastery continued to grow, and Saint Pafnutii began to understand that the little wooden oratory would not be sufficient to house that many monks. He and his monks laboured for several years on the building of a stone church at the centre of the monastery. The edifice being finished, and the workmanship being admired all over Russia, the prince of Borovsk invited several excellent iconographers to design frescoes for the interior of the Church, including a layman named Dionisii, who was attached to the monastery. Dionisii was an excellent writer of icons, but his feet were lame, and he could not work for long on the tall, broad interiors of the stone church. But Saint Pafnutii prayed for Dionisii, that Christ and the Theotokos might grant strength to his feet, and his lameness was healed as he began his work.

The lay brethren, including Dionisii, were under injunction from the saint not to bring flesh meats within the monastery enclosure. For the most part they kept to this rule, but Dionisii broke it on one occasion by bringing a thigh of lamb stuffed with eggs into the monastery for his dinner. As he sat down to his dinner, he opened the eggs only to find that they were filled with maggots. His whole body began to itch and within an hour he was almost completely covered with sores. At once he sent for the saint and confessed his sin, begging for forgiveness. Saint Pafnutii sternly warned him not to do it again, but readily forgave him, took him into the Church and sprinkled holy water over him. Dionisii went to sleep that night, and after he awoke the next morning his skin was healed of its sores.

Saint Pafnutii was very fond of wild animals, especially birds. He firmly besought anyone who came onto the monastery grounds that they were not to harm the ravens who nested in the woods around the monastery. One proud boyar unleashed his falcon upon the ravens, but no sooner had his falcon gotten his talons into a raven but it plummeted from the sky – dead. At another time, the son of a local burgomaster was riding by the monastery with some friends, and chanced to see a murder of ravens take wing in front of him. Without thinking, he drew his bow and shot, felling one of the poor birds. He turned his head behind him to boast to his friends at having made such a shot, but found that his neck was frozen in place as he did so. He could not turn back the right way. His friends, alarmed, took him before Saint Pafnutii. And of course he knew what had happened and how the young man had behaved. Saint Pafnutii hit the bell and summoned the brothers, who demanded to know why he had called them at an irregular hour. And Pafnutii told them: ‘God has avenged the blood of a raven.’ He then prayed over the young man in the name of the Holy Cross, and told the young man to turn his head around the right way. In this way his neck was healed.

Like Saint Isaac of Spoleto, Saint Pafnutii used his keen insight to gently admonish and enlighten thieves. A group of thieves who stole three oxen from the monastery were stricken blind and blundered around the woods through most of the night before the monastic brothers found them the next morning; Saint Pafnutii healed their eyes and they did not steal again. At another time, a servant who had withheld for himself some alms from his master meant for the monastery, was greeted in a friendly way by the saint. But when he sat down to bread, his whole body became paralysed and he could not move. Saint Pafnutii took him into the church, prayed over him so that he was healed, and admonished him in secret about what he had done before sending him back home. The whole monastery knew of this story, but he would not tell the brethren of the reason for it until much later.

Elder Pafnutii was often given his divine insights in visions; at one time two brothers wished to leave the monastery, and Elder Pafnutii was warned of this in a dream. He saw a devil take burning brands from his hearth and use them to set alight the cell which the two brothers shared. He told this vision to the two brothers the following day. They showed him that they had packed their few belongings and had prepared to leave, and then confessed and repented their sin. At another time, a brother of the monastery who had a shrewd and sarcastic tongue received a dream in which he was cast out of the church and given over to be beaten by devils after having made one biting remark too many. He confessed to Elder Pafnutii and mastered his tongue.

Saint Pafnutii told his disciples that one could tell the state of a man’s soul by looking into his eyes. In several cases he proved this. One young monk who had come across a group of women in the village came back to the monastery filled with disturbing thoughts. Elder Pafnutii looked him in the eyes once and sighed, ‘This man is not the same as he was before!’ Distraught, the young man sought the counsel of the monk Iosif Sanin, who sent him to confess his sins. Thus Saint Pafnutii was able to correct him. On another occasion someone from Saint Iosif’s village came to visit Saint Pafnutii, desiring to become a monk. Pafnutii sent him away, and Iosif asked him why. Pafnutii told him that his countryman had once murdered a monk by stabbing him in the stomach with a knife, and had never confessed this sin. He knew this by looking him in the eye. He was even able likewise to discover one of the monks who had poisoned his master many years before, and had never confessed that sin either. Elder Pafnutii was clear that no amount of ascetic striving can take the place of confession and repentance.

Elder Pafnutii once cured a demoniac who came riding into the monastery enclosure demanding to see him. He came up to Saint Pafnutii not knowing his face, and demanded to see the saint. But the elder looked the demoniac in the eye and said: ‘You’re not out of your wits, but a crafty devil has got its hold on you.’ The demoniac flew into a rage and tried to assault Pafnutii, but failing to harm him got back on his horse and made his way to a nearby lake, where he tried to drown himself. The monastic brothers lay hold on him and brought him back to Saint Pafnutii, who was able to release him from the demon and give him back soundness of mind.

There was another miracle of Saint Pafnutii involving fish. He asked the prince leave for three days to send lay brothers to fish at a certain spot. Then he gave one of the brothers money to buy several new barrels. This lay brother, however, was stingy, and complained to Pafnutii that he didn’t need to buy new barrels, he’d just take an old one. But the saint glared ferociously at him, and ordered him to take the money and buy the barrels. The reluctant fisherman went and did as the saint told him. At the end of those three days, he had caught 730 large fish for the monastery – more than the prince had caught fishing that same place all summer! It was enough to fill up not just the old barrel but every one of the new barrels he’d bought with the saint’s money. And he was well-furnished because the saint had foreseen the results of his fishing.

One of Saint Pafnutii’s students developed an inflammation of the eye. In grave suffering he sought healing; Saint Pafnutii gave him his prayer rope and told him to say the Jesus Prayer one thousand times. The student was in such agony from his eyes he could barely move his lips, but the prayer came to him more and more smoothly, and as he got to five hundred iterations he felt the healing power come over him. He left off praying and jumped up with joy to tell the saint, but soon the inflammation seized him again as badly as before. Saint Pafnutii chided him and told him to complete the thousand prayers; only after he did so was he fully healed.

Saint Pafnutii also healed a leper who was suffering and very near to death. Pafnutii not only healed his deathly illness, but also cleansed his skin from the corruption of the disease by sprinkling holy water upon him. Another man was brought to Saint Pafnutii on the brink of death. The doctors had pronounced him doomed to die within the day, and his relatives had already made preparations to bury him. But the monk prayed over the man, and he rose from his bed and – to the amazement of his kin – walked about in fullness of health, as though he’d never been sick. At another time, a noblewoman went weeping before the saint begging his prayers for her son, who was sickly and on the point of death. Saint Pafnutii, who loved children and took pity on the woman’s state, prepared some holy water and also sent her back with some fish for the child to eat. (It was customary at that time to give recovering invalids something to eat to gauge if they were really returning to health.) The noblewoman was not much reassured, expecting to come back and find her son dead. But she went back to her son and sprinkled the holy water over his body, and at once the boy sat up in his bed and greeted her with joy, then asked her for food. His noble mother gave him the fish Saint Pafnutii had sent back with her.

Saint Pafnutii cured several demoniacs through the invocations of the Holy Cross. A certain noblewoman who was known to Aleksei Goburin was possessed by such a devil; she often sent her sons with offerings to the Nativity Monastery. She was attacked by many devils in her dreams, but always in these dreams a grey-bearded old monk would stand in front of her and drive the devils back from her, and she heard a voice in her ear repeating, ‘Pafnutii of Borovsk will drive the devils away from you.’ After she had been cleansed she went to Borovsk to see the saint, but women were not allowed to enter the monastery. She sent her sons inside and bade them bring Pafnutii within sight of her. They did as she asked, and when she saw him she recognised him at once as the man in her dreams who had held off the hordes of devils from her. From then on she became a generous patron of both monasteries. Another novice was tormented by dreams of a devil who prowled around his cell – sometimes in the form of a great dog, and at other times in the form of the bear. When he told Saint Pafnutii of this, the elder instructed the novice to read with him from the Psalter. The power of the Psalms held off and chased away the devils, who did not return to plague the young novice.

Elder Pafnutii was a close friend to the poor and humble. He did not hesitate to stand up to the powerful and proud, and was not servile before them. But with those who approached him in humility, he was warmly accessible. He made no distinction between monk and lay; he spoke gladly with common folk and invited them to his table as brothers. None of them ever left a conversation with him in a spirit of mourning. Any wayfarer who came into his monastery was welcome to his table and would not leave unfed. In one year there was a famine in Borovsk, and Saint Pafnutii threw open the larders of the monastery and gave away every last crumb of food in it to those who were starving. When the stores ran out so that nothing remained even for the monks, Saint Pafnutii prayed all the harder for the deliverance of the hungry, and with tears implored God to let the people live until the next summer. And wondrously, the monks went into the larder to find that the food had been replenished! Elder Pafnutii held generosity and justice to beggars and the needy to be the chief of virtues. He was fond of telling this story:

One act of charity can save a man, if he lives by the law. One generous man did alms throughout his life. When he died, another man was given this vision of his soul’s progress. He was brought to the river of fire, and on the other side of the river was Paradise: a wondrously bright, warm, sweet and beautiful garden. But the soul of the man found no way across this horrible river. But he begins to see the souls of the beggars who received alms from him in life. With their bodies they lay down across the river, making a bridge for him. By their grace to him, the generous man crossed the bridge into Paradise.

According to Saint Pafnutii, God who protected Russia could also turn His face away from the Russian people if they went too long astray from the correct path, and refused to repent of their sins for too long. He spoke in such terms about the calamity of plague that fell upon the Russian people in the year 1407, and rebuked the Russian people for falling further into drunkenness, licence and greed rather than returning to God and their love of their neighbours. (It seems a timely reminder now: in the time of plague Elder Pafnutii exhorted his people to be kinder to one another, and neither to turn away from the needy for fear of contagion, nor to hoard food or livestock or gold or silver.)

During this plague, he said, there was one nun who was rescued from the sickness on the brink of death, and who was given visions of who was there in the afterlife. She said that she had seen the generous, the merciful, those who were mindful of the poor, and those who were kind to animals, in Paradise, regardless of their faults in life. Figuring prominently of those she had seen in paradise, interestingly enough, was Ivan I Kalita of Moscow, who despite his flaws of character and temperament was apparently fairly generous to the poor.

Among those she had seen in torment were the greedy and avaricious. She saw devils tormenting the souls of the wicked by forcing them to wear white-hot chains of gold, or by throwing gold coins into their open mouths and mocking them by telling them to eat and be satisfied. One of the greedy she saw being thus tormented, it seems, was the notoriously opulent Lithuanian king Vytautas.

Pafnutii also once had a vision while he dozed on the Church steps in the few minutes before the reading of the Gospel at Divine Liturgy. He saw the gates of the monastery open and a crowd of men and women with candles come into the Church. One of them, as he passed, he recognised as one prince Yuri Vasil’evich, whom he realised had died. The prince had apparently considered himself to have been allowed to enter Heaven only by the prayers of the saint. After the vision was over and Saint Pafnutii awoke, he went into the Church praising God’s mercy.

Saint Pafnutii sent his beloved disciple Saint Iosif Sanin to the court of the knyaz Mikhail Fedorovich of Vorotyn, where he found the nobleman deeply downcast. Iosif asked him what was wrong. The nobleman, it turned out, had kept a monk close by his side: a holy man named Matvei Varnavoi. The prince of Vorotyn had loved Matvei and cherished his advice, which was always wise and timely. But his son Ivan Mikhailovich had grown jealous of the holy man and ordered him to be killed. Shortly after this Ivan Mikhailovich himself died, and his mother desired to have a commemoration Liturgy held for him. But when the priest sent for prosphora to be baked, the oven began to roar so hot that it scorched the bread which was supposed to be blessed. When Elder Pafnutii heard this from his pupil Iosif, he gave a profound sigh of grief. ‘The Lord has told me the truth: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay; (Rom. 12:19) and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matt. 7:2)”’

Elder Pafnutii said of the monastic life:

The root of the monastic life is—not possessing anything; obedience and humility; and placing yourself below everyone else.

Abbot Pafnutii, it must be said, was a model not only of humility and forgiveness but also of just plain old hard work. He chopped and hauled firewood, dug out plots for farming, weeded, watered and raised the vegetables, and yet always managed to arrive early to prepare for the daily Divine Liturgy in the oratory. Being a schemamonk, he normally would not serve the Liturgy himself, but took the Gifts together with his brothers – only once did he serve the Liturgy, with no priest being available for his monks, and afterwards he said that for fear and awe his soul had barely remained in his body. He wore a ragged sheepskin garment and threadbare shoes not even fit for a beggar. He was lenient and patient with his brothers, but strict upon himself. He lived all the time in the original cell he had made when he took on the Great Schema. At mealtimes he always ate last, allowing his brothers to take the choice food for themselves. He fasted totally on Mondays and Fridays, and ate no oil or sauce on Wednesdays. He also was so humble that he did not dare to bodily touch anyone, man or woman, for he revered them above icons, as they were icons of God. He never spoke unless he had something needful and meaningful to say.

At the age of twenty he entered the monastic life. At the age of forty he became an abbot. He spent sixty years under monastic discipline – twenty-seven of those under the Great Schema. And at the age of eighty years, in the year 1475, having reached the end of his earthly days, he reposed in the Lord, at peace with his brothers and beloved by all.

Saint Pafnutii of Borovsk was indeed a model of justice as well as holiness, the two not being at odds but finding completion one in the other. He did not pursue meekness and humility and chastity in a closed-off and selfish way, for his own sake alone, but did everything for the sake of his monastic disciples and for the common people who lived around him. He gave of his own physical substance, his monastic reserves, and his spiritual wealth as well for the sake of those who were suffering in times of famine. As such he is a perfect saint to commemorate on May Day along with the Prophet Jeremiah. Holy abbot Pafnutii, meek and gentle servant of the poor, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Pafnutii of Borovsk, Tone 4:

Thou didst illumine thy fatherland
With thy radiant life of prayer and fasting,
And wast filled with divine gifts of the Spirit.
Thou didst strive valiantly in this temporal life and show mercy to all,
Becoming an intercessor for the poor.
And so we entreat thee, O Father Pafnutii,
Pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!