ATTN: philosophers

Attention, philosophers.

It seems most of you didn’t get the memo. You did not get renewed for a new season. Your subscription got cancelled. Your account has been locked due to your repeated violations of community standards. Miss Σοφία had to put out a restraining order on you creeps, because you wouldn’t leave her alone, 2,400 years after she let you know in no uncertain terms that she wanted nothing to do with you.

The only one among you who even halfway took the hint was Schelling.

But some of you are still (now, as then) following the wrong German, going on Piers Morgan and flapping your fascist white-supremacist gums about the New Yellow Peril as though (now, as then) a genocide wasn’t going on right under your nose, this time brought to you by the same NATO forces you serve.

You. Are. Done.

Go home.

Your calls for nuclear war are sick. That should go without saying. It should have gone without saying since Sam Harris said it. But what’s even sicker is that you keep blaming the victim.

Scripture already stands against you, as it always has. You have already been judged. Socrates is dead. Plato is dead. Aristotle is dead. Your great Academy is standing in ruins. But you persist in wanting to fling yourself into the dung pile along with it.

Go ahead. Call me a ‘dark conservative religious fanatic’. I don't care. Call me ‘no less than Arabs’. I'll take it as a compliment, والله!

God will judge me, as He will judge us all. I have no doubt about that. I have no doubt that my case’s defence will be insufficient.

But at least, ان شاء الله, I won't be a ‘philosopher’. Or a ‘leftist’, if being a ‘leftist’ means what you say it does.

One German musician’s wise perspective on the Ukraine conflict

I have reposted this from the public Facebook profile of a German industrial-rock musician, a certain Mr J—, with whom I share a mutual contact. I am providing here my own translation of his post. Speaking for myself, I think his perspective here is quite wise, and should be shared broadly.

For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.

- Job 3:25

If this war has shown us anything, it is primarily that each side invested in it has achieved with its actions, the exact opposite of what it wished to achieve.

Putin (likely) hoped for a ‘liberated’ Ukrainian (brother-)people, who would throw themselves around the necks of the Russian soldiers as soon as they marched in. Instead, he got embittered enemies who only hated his people even more, and wanted even less to do with him than they already had. He also wanted ‘less NATO’. But now, he has even more NATO countries around him: an even more cohesive NATO with greater manpower.

The Ukrainian state leadership, politically driven by ultra-nationalist and Russophobic white supremacists such as Azov, who honour as Ukrainian national heroes war criminals and Jew-murderers like Stepan Bandera, name boulevards after them and depict them on postage stamps, wanted economic prosperity (especially for their oligarchs and corrupt political elites) and territorial integrity. They will get – as it currently stands – a country in even greater ruin, and even more lost territory.

The USA wanted to crush their rival Russia and expand their global hegemony. Instead, they have damaged themselves economically and politically, and promoted an alliance between Russia and arch-rival China, thereby finally destroying their chances for hegemony. The arch-rival, China, is thus ‘the laughing third party’. In turn, the West in turn wanted to harm Russia, but have primarily harmed themselves, politically destabilised themselves and further damaged confidence in their political leadership.

Hopefully, this will prove to be a lesson for all, that conflict is better off being settled peaceably, than ‘rendering evil for evil’ (1 Peter 3:9), and it will hopefully lead to the realisation that war is simply ‘not worth it’. Anyone who is involved in it in any way, only loses.

Feriengewitter: a review

Dani (Étienne Charle) and Lucie (Sandra Puhlmann) in Feriengewitter

East German cinema is something of a new field for me, but if films like Eine Liebe in Deutschland and Feriengewitter are representative, it’s one I’m happy to continue exploring. The East German film Feriengewitter (Holiday Storm), directed by Karola Hattop, is a fun little made-for-TV family movie that’s two parts The Parent Trap and one part National Lampoon’s Vacation, with an 80s Europop soundtrack and a bit of seasoning from To Kill a Mockingbird. This sounds like a combination that shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Feriengewitter somehow manages its disparate slapstick / screwball comedic elements, its family-drama secrets and its urban-rural tensions with a deft hand and a subtle sensitivity.

Basically, the film starts with a Berlin family in crisis. Peter and Rosi, a middle-aged couple, bicker with each other whenever their son Dani isn’t in the room. They’re tired of each other and want to get a divorce, but Peter doesn’t want to spring the news on Dani at the start of the summer holiday. Instead, they’ll wait it out until after their holiday is over before signing the papers. On a suggestion from Dani, they decide to visit the far southeast—the Elbe Sandstone Mountains on the border with Czechoslovakia—for a road trip over their holiday. However, while in the village, Dani meets a cheeky, precocious, cigarette-smoking, gum-chewing tomboy named Lucie, who immediately strikes his interest. In his attempts to impress and befriend Lucie, he ends up accidentally discovering his parents’ plan to divorce. And then there’s the weird old forester who lives alone out in the woods outside the village, who also supposedly keeps a mummy of his dead wife in the attic…

Feriengewitter at first looks like it’s going to be something of a bildungsroman for Dani: a boy going out into the world, meeting his first crush, going on adventures in the countryside, eventually asserting his agency and deciding where and how he will live in the face of his parents’ divorce. And to be truthful: there is a lot of that bildungsroman in here. In between taking stupid dares bull-baiting, trespassing in the old forester’s house and downing half a bottle of honey schnapps (with the inevitable consequences the next morning), Dani does develop as a character, attempts to find his own place in the world, attempts to take responsibility for himself and the people he cares about. Lucie, despite her reputation as the ‘horror of the agricultural commune’, ends up advising him and encouraging him throughout, and also asserting her own preferences; this is, in a more limited way, a growth-story for her as well.

But ultimately, it’s the parents who are faced with the decision to grow up. Dani and Lucie are the ones who seem to hold the most functional moral compasses in the film. Peter and Rosi, on the other hand, find themselves at pains to justify their decision to split—not just to Dani, but even to each other and to themselves. We get hints that both of them are half-heartedly trying to start affairs behind each other’s backs, even though neither of them really likes their new flings as much as they like each other. And even their arguments and attempts to hide the truth from Dani have a ring of falsity to them. Thankfully, the film does end up allowing Peter and Rosi to sit down and talk to each other rather than at each other—even though it’s an understated scene, it’s nonetheless quite emotionally impactful.

The film’s pretty clearly a low-rent production. The limited-range cinematography, lighting effects, the sound quality (some of the dialogue is close to inaudible), the Vermona keyboard soundtrack, the animated cartoon lightning-bolts, both the urban and the rural set pieces—all of them scream ‘made for TV’ and ‘bottle-cap budget’. But despite its limitations, Feriengewitter more than makes up in heart what it lacks in technical effects.

Indeed, one of the reasons that the film works so well is that the acting is so convincing. Étienne Charle’s subtle expressions—from smile to sulk to scoff to stare—make his Dani instantly believable as a pubescent boy who tries to navigate his parents’ estrangement and immanent divorce at the same time as he sorts out his own first explorations into romantic affection with Lucie. Acting opposite him, Sandra Puhlmann easily holds her own with an irrepressible, plucky, foul-mouthed charm. And even the tired, squabbling parents, played by Joachim Lätsch and Bärbel Röhl, handle their roles well, such that we can believe that there’s still chemistry between them even though they say they’re at quits. It’s rare even today to see actors of this age handle so deftly a script which crams this degree of emotional complexity into a ninety-minute runtime.

There are too many TV shows and movies nowadays, both in America and elsewhere, which glamourise or trivialise divorce: which sympathise with the adults over the kids; which treat individual desire, emotional and physical gratification as the natural goods which should be served by marriage, rather than any sort of common whole; and which treat marriage as completely soluble when those goods are not served to one spouse’s satisfaction. Feriengewitter shows us, in ways both subtle and overt, the seriousness of the impact on the kids, as well as on the adults—as Peter and Rosi look over old photographs of themselves with Dani on the dining-room table at their flat in Berlin, for example. It’s also a film that doesn’t patronise or sugarcoat childhood. With the foregoing caveat that I’m evaluating Feriengewitter at a remove both in cultural and physical space (an American watching a German film) and in time (an adult in the 2020s watching a kids’ film from the 1980s), it’s still somewhat refreshing to see a film made for kids that portrays tweens and early teens fighting, cussing, smoking cigarettes, swilling hard liquor, getting revenge and doing stupid life-threatening stunts to impress each other… without approving of it, and also without using a sledgehammer to moralise over it.

Watching it today, though, I can imagine a good part of Feriengewitter’s appeal would come from its Ostalgie value. The East German kids who would have grown up watching this movie on television would be probably five to ten years older than I am, and I can well imagine it has the same value to them that kids’ TV shows from the 1990s (like Ghostwriter) have for me. Considering even this factor, though, objectively I still think this is very much a solid film with a well-crafted script. I very much recommend it.

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.

Leg dich nicht mit dem Bären an

A major victory for renters in Berlin today:

Berliners have backed one of Europe’s most radical responses to gentrification: seizing property from so-called mega landlords. In a referendum timed to coincide with Germany’s general election on Sunday, locals supported expropriation by 56% to 39%.

“It’s nearly impossible to describe this feeling,” Kalle Kunkel, an activist for Berlin’s Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen campaign, told Euronews. “For many of us, it feels like the end of a four-year marathon. Or at the very least, we’ve reached a major high point.”

The campaign is named after Deutsche Wohnen, a private landlord that held more than 110,000 apartments in Berlin.

Kunkel sees the referendum victory as the culmination of years of campaigning against skyrocketing housing and rental prices. The vote could see private landlords that hold more than 3,000 units having them expropriated and folded into the city’s affordable housing stock. This would socialise more than 240,000 apartments.

“It was an incredibly clear victory,” Kunkel added. “A majority of Berliners in all but two (of 12) districts supported the initiative. Which means the whole city said: ‘We don’t want speculators to have a say in our housing’. And that’s a decision that political leaders simply can’t ignore.”

Unfortunately, it looks like Berliners’ just and democratic demands may be quashed by a constitutional court. But the fact that this referendum passed, primarily with the support of The Left party and a coalition of mostly younger renters in Berlin, shows that voters are increasingly convinced that deep-reaching systemic change is necessary to correct course. It is a big step toward a more just order.

Our father among the saints Grēgorios III, Pope of Rome

Saint Grēgorios of Rome

The twenty-eighth of November is the feast-day in the Orthodox Church of Saint Grēgorios of Rome, also known as Pope Gregory III. I have already presented on this blog a hagiography of Pope Gregory I, or Grēgorios o Dialogos, who did so much to promote the spread of Christianity in England. Like the first Gregory, the third Gregory in the Roman See did much to help spread the light of Christ into the northern reaches of Europe. A native of Syria, the third Gregory was instrumental in the fight against iconoclasm from the West.

Saint Grēgorios [Gk. Γρηγόριος, L. Gregorius, Syr. Grigorios ܓܪܝܓܘܪܝܘܣ, Ar. Ġrîġûriyûs غريغوريوس] was born in Syria around the year 669 to a father named Yûhannâ. He spent much of his early life there, though historians are not aware of many of the details of his early life. We know that he became a priest, and we also know that he had lived in Rome for some time before his election to the Papacy. It is likely that, like his predecessor Saint Sergios, he and his family were refugees from the Islâmic conquests and persecutions of Christians in the Levant, though we cannot be sure based on the sources we have.

We do know, however, that he had a high reputation as a priest in Rome for virtuous conduct and diligent pastoral care. He loved the people of Rome, and in turn he was beloved by them. Upon the repose of his illustrious Italian prædecessor, Pope Gregory II, Grēgorios was proclaimed Pope by popular acclaim in the city of Rome. Even so, Grēgorios waited for about a month to receive consecration, which indicates that he sought the confirmation and blessing of the Byzantine exarch of Ravenna, Eutychios, before taking office. Grēgorios did indeed love the people, but he had no desire to owe his office to a mob, and we can see that he sought the legitimacy of Constantinople as well as of the people of Rome.

But once in his office, Grēgorios did not bow to Constantinople – only to God. Though he had previously been involved in the arguments over the veneration of icons, and had appealed to the Emperor Lēon III the Isaurian to exercise moderation in his religious policies. But once he became Pope, Saint Grēgorios came forth at once with blunt condemnations of iconoclasm, sending legates and letters to Lēon urging him to desist from the destruction of holy images. Lēon responded with brute force, sending forces across the Mediterranean and seizing Papal properties which were under his jurisdiction, in Calabria and Sicily. However, the Emperor lost many of his men at sea and proved unable to control the Papacy directly, and Grēgorios was not cowed, but continued speaking out in favour of the veneration of icons. Most regional rulers ended up siding with the Pope over the Emperor in this case.

Similarly to his prædecessors of the same name, Grēgorios took a close and paternal interest in the well-being and good order of the Church in the northern reaches of Europe, among the Germanic tribes. In faithful England, Grēgorios affirmed the rights of the Bishopric of York in the election of Ecgberht to the office. He also blessed Saints Tatwine and Nóðhelm, in succession, as primates of Canterbury. He continued the support of Gregory II for the mission of Saint Boniface among the heathen in Frisia and northern Germany, naming him an archbishop and blessing him to establish two Benedictine cloisters – one in Fritzlar and one in Amöneburg. He met with Boniface in person at least once, in 738, having received him with great hospitality in Rome and conversed with him for a long time on spiritual topics. Saint Boniface asked the holy Pope of Rome to send with him back to Germany a helper, in the person of his nephew Willibald. At once Grēgorios sent for the monk and was at once impressed with him. In particular, we may imagine, Pope Grēgorios was happy to discuss with Willibald his travels as a pilgrim in Syria and the Holy Land. Saint Grēgorios sent Willibald with his uncle back into Germany to serve as an aid and support in his missionary efforts. Later Willibald himself would be made a bishop at Saint Boniface’s hands in Eichstätt.

Saint Grēgorios’s relations with other Teutonic nations were not nearly as cordial as those he enjoyed with the English. Much of his ten-year papacy was spent in power struggles with the Lombardic king Liutprant – who, although he was a pious Christian, generous and hospitable to the likes of Saint Boniface, was nonetheless politically ambitious and had territorial designs on the Italian Peninsula. Grēgorios managed to fortify the ancient walls of Rome in the hopes that it would ward off a Lombard attack, and in addition met in person with Liutprant to attempt to use moral suasion to ward him away from Rome. This worked for awhile, but with Liutprant continuing to make violent manœuvres on the frontier – and capturing four cities in the Duchy of Rome – he was compelled to seek aid from the Frankish king Charles Martel. Long story short: Martel promised help, but that help never came. It was in the midst of these political troubles that Saint Grēgorios reposed in the Lord, on the twenty-eighth of November, 741. A few days later, the cardinals of Rome chose Saint Zacharias, a Greek, as Grēgorios’s successor in office.

I have remarked on several occasions about the special link which præ-Schismatic Old England seems to have enjoyed with Antioch, and with the Christian East in general. Though this link was often (but not always) mediated, gæographically and administratively, by Rome, it still arguably goes back to the Princes of the Apostles themselves. The most prominent and most profound impact of Antiochian spirituality upon the English nation comes through the literal tutelage England enjoyed under the rule of Saint Theodore of Tarsos. Saint Theodore’s contemporary Saint Sergios provides another link between Syria and England. The cultus of Saint Ia in Cornwall, which shares some intriguing parallels with the Mesopotamian martyress under the Persians of the same name, provides another possible link, as does the patronage of that great Levantine Saint George of Lydda and the mediæval body of legend surrounding Saint Joseph of Arimathæa. To all these we must add the relationship that our Saint Grēgorios enjoyed with Saint Willibald, who had sojourned in that land for a significant portion of his life, and with his uncle Saint Boniface.

It is to their great credit that Syrians like Saint Grēgorios III did not take advantage of the old Anglo-Saxon talent for civilisational humility, borne perhaps in part out of a realisation that they lived at the ‘bottom’ of the world, but instead took the opportunity to guide, to nurture, to foster an Old English spirituality. That spirituality today exists as merely a shadow, an echo. The overbearing arrogance of the Normans, the expropriation of Church lands, the misguided zeal of centralising church ‘reformers’, the sustained repression of the English peasantry and the shift toward an œconomy of greed all contributed to the suppression of this native spirituality. Mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, industrialisation and high finance have all taken a great toll upon the English people. The massive death toll and material deprivation that the British ruling class has unleashed upon the world – including upon Syria and the Arab world, a deprivation which continues to this day – often overshadows the much quieter impoverishment of English spiritual life by that same class.

Yet this echo of spiritual Old English reverence for the Eastern end of the Mediterranean can still be heard in English literature and art: in figures like the Syriac-versant Lancelot Andrewes, for example. Our good Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote Rasselas, may be counted here with distinction; John Ruskin and William Morris, also. To this we may also add the more contemporary travel literature and journalistic work of Patrick Seale, of William Dalrymple, of the late, lamented Robert Fisk and the blessedly very much alive Jonathan Cook. For these things we must still thank our saints like the holy Pope Grēgorios III. Holy hierarch Grēgorios, beloved archpastor and gentle tutor of the Christian north, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Holy Martyrs Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos of Edessa

Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos of Edessa
القديسين الشهداء غوريا وصامونا وحبيب

The fifteenth of November is the feast-day of Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos, confessors and martyrs of Edessa. Gourias and Samōnas and Abibos suffered for Christ at the end of the third century and at the beginning of the fourth century, respectively. According to Patriarch Makarios III (Zaym), all three were Syriac in origin, and hailed from villages near Aleppo. Gourias hailed from the village of Qaṭma north of ‘Afrîn; Samōnas from ‘Anadân 12 kilometres north of Aleppo; and Abibos from Tal ‘Adâ in Salamîya. Unlike a lot of the other early martyrs of the East, the cultus of these three saints still seems to be fairly localised to the Christian East: the Orthodox Church (and Antioch in particular), as well as the churches in the Assyrian tradition, whether in communion with the Latins or not. However, all three martyrs are quite important in the Orthodox tradition, and Abibos in particular is revered among the great martyrs of the Antiochian Church.

Saints Gourias [Gk. Γουρίας, L. Gurias, Ar. Ġûryâ غوريا] and Samōnas [Gk. Σαμωυάς, L. Samon, Ar. Ṣâmûnâ صامونا] were friends, priests and ‘preachers of the Word of God’. During the reign of Diocletian, the two friends played a significant rôle in strengthening the faith of the local Christians. They were arrested and brought to trial, where they were ordered to give sacrifices to the idols of the pagan gods. They refused and instead boldly confessed their faith in Christ before the præfect, Antoninos. As punishment, the two martyrs were beaten and hung up each by one wrist for five hours straight while heavy weights were suspended from their ankles. Then they were cast into an oubliette for three and a half months, with no food and little water. However, Gourias and Samōnas endured everything with patience. One of their fellow-prisoners overheard the prayer spoken by Samōnas, from whose eyewitness it was later transcribed:

O Lord my God, against Whose will not a single sparrow falls into the snare. It was You Who made room for David in his sorrow (Ps 4:1), Who proved the Prophet David stronger than lions (Dan 6), and granted a child of Abraham to be victor over torture and flames (Dan 3). You know also, Lord, the infirmity of our nature, You see the struggle set before us. Our foe strives to snatch us, the work of Your right hand, away from You and to deprive us of the glory which is in You. With Your compassionate eye watching over us, preserve in us the inextinguishable light of Your Commandments. Guide our steps by Your light, and make us worthy of Your Kingdom, for You are blessed unto ages of ages.

That night the guards took Gourias and Samōnas out of the prison, led them out of the city gates and had them beheaded. The faithful of Edessa went out to retrieve their bodies, and even the soil which had borne their precious blood, and brought them back into Edessa with incense and psalms praising God, to be tended and buried reverently.

About three decades after this, during the persecution under the reign of the last pagan emperor Licinius, a hue and cry went up on the orders of the governor Lucian for a deacon of Edessa named Abibos [Gk. Άβιβος, L. Habibus, Ar. Ḥabîb حبيب], who had been truly assiduous in promoting the true Faith, reading the Holy Scriptures to the people in the outlying villages around Edessa. Rather than be hunted down and run to earth, and rather than endangering his mother in whose house he lived, Abibos surrendered himself willingly to his persecutors, who brought him to the trial. Abibos freely and willingly confessed Christ there.

The governor ordered Abibos to be flogged and flayed, and then scourged with iron hooks. After these tortures Lucian, who was infuriated by the ineffectiveness of the torture upon the martyr, sentenced him not to be beheaded but rather burned alive. The executioners prepared the fire, and Abibos willingly went into the fire himself. Praying to the Lord the whole while, he surrendered his soul and achieved the victory. When the fire died down, his mother and his relations came to retrieve his body, which they discovered had been unharmed by the flames. They sought permission, and were given it, to bury his body next to those of Gourias and Samōnas, that they together might be honoured as martyrs for Christ. Later, a church was built on the site in honour of the martyrs.

A number of miracles attended the graves of the three holy martyrs. One of these is related in their hagiography. A certain fœderatus, a Goth, was sent to serve in Edessa. He saw and wanted a certain pretty and pious local young woman named Euphemia, and sought to take her to wife. He went to her mother, a widow of Edessa named Sophia, and asked permission to marry her, but the girl’s mother was understandably reticent. Before she gave him permission to marry Euphemia, she took him to the graves of Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos and made him swear that he would never do her any harm, or insult her, but always love and cherish her.

After his term of service in Edessa was over, the Goth took Euphemia back to his homeland. As it turned out, he had deceived the poor girl: he was already married to a woman of his own tribe, and as per the tribal laws Euphemia was made to serve as the Goth’s bed-thrall, subservient to the Goth’s first wife in all things. The Goth threatened Euphemia with death, if she ever made known that they had married; and the Goth’s wife treated the girl horribly. Euphemia bore the Goth a son, but the jealous wife had the boy poisoned in the cradle. Moreover, before the evil woman died, she demanded that her husband bury Euphemia alive with her. The hagiography states that this appears to have been customary among the Goths who were still heathen. Thus threatened with death, and sealed in with the earth around her, Euphemia cried out to the three holy martyrs for protection.

The Lord preserved Euphemia from death. She was wondrously transported out of her grave and back to Edessa, indeed into the very church of the three holy martyrs, where her mother received her with joy. Euphemia told her mother what had befallen her, and when the Goth came to serve again in Edessa Sophia denounced him before the whole city. He was placed under arrest by the præfect and executed for his crimes. For this reason the akathist proclaims Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos to be the ‘heavenly patrons of honourable marriage’. Their intercession is sought among those in troubled marriages and family turmoil. Holy saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saints Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos of Edessa, Tone 5:

Christ our God, You have granted us the miracles of Your holy martyrs
Gourias, Samōnas and Abibos,
As a stronghold and protection.
Through their prayers, strengthen those in authority in every good deed,
For You alone are merciful and the Lover of Mankind!

Holy Martyrs Viktōr and Stephanida of Damascus

Saints Viktōr and Stephanida of Damascus

The eleventh of November is the feast-day of another pair of early Syrian martyrs for Christ, Saints Viktōr and Stephanida of Damascus. These saints lived during the second century and were persecuted during the reign of the Emperor of the Porch, Marcus Aurelius. These saints enjoy a universal cultus which is of a singular importance in our modern time. Saint Stephanida, on account of the etymology of her name, has been invoked by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches for protection and aid against the novel coronavirus.

Saint Viktōr [Gk. Βίκτωρ, L. Victor, Ar. Fîktûr فيكتور] was born in Italy, and was a loyal Roman soldier who served in the Army and was stationed in Damascus. The governor of Damascus at that time was named Sebastianos. Though it is unclear from the evidence whether he had the Emperor’s express sanction to do so, Sebastianos began a ruthless purge of the Christians from the army ranks in his præcinct, by ordering all the soldiers under his command to offer sacrifices to the idols. Naturally, the young Italian refused to make this sacrifice, and when Sebastianos ordered him to do so, invoking his loyalty to the Emperor, Viktōr replied: ‘I am a warrior under command of the Heavenly King. Him only will I serve. I reject your foul idols!’

The military commander then ordered that Viktōr’s limbs be locked into vices and that his digits, both fingers and toes, be broken and torn from their sockets one at a time. The young soldier endured this pain and various other torments that were inflicted upon him, calling upon the name of the Lord. Then the executioners brought food to him, which had been laced with a deadly poison by a pagan sorcerer. Again Saint Viktōr prayed to the Lord, and he swallowed all of the tainted food. The poison did Viktōr no harm, and all who were there marvelled and feared to see it. The sorcerer, who saw his arts defeated by the holy martyr, abjured his powerless idols and was converted to faith in Christ. Another wonder wrought by the martyr was that soldiers with diseases of the eye were cured and their sight restored.

But the executioners began to rend and burn the martyr’s flesh. Upon seeing this, the young bride of one of the tormentors, a fifteen-year-old girl of Ægyptian descent named Stephanida [Gk. Στεφανίδα, L. Corona, Ar. Kûrûnâ كورونا] could bear no longer, and ran to the martyr to tend to his wounds and plead for mercy. But seeing what he had already endured, and the wonders that the holy martyr had wrought, she opened her mouth and glorified Christ before the governor. The cruel Sebastianos ordered that the young girl be seized, that two young palm trees be bent to the ground, and that the girl’s limbs be tied to each. The palm trees were then released and the young martyr for Christ was torn bodily between them – in this way she earned the glorious crown which her name foreshadowed.

During his torments, Saint Viktōr prophesied that death would take the executioners within twelve days, and that the governor would be overthrown within twenty-four days. Sebastianos ordered that the saint be beheaded, and he too went to the glories of the life æternal and received the laurels due to Christ’s athletes. And as Saint Viktōr had prophesied before his death, so the doom of the executioners and the governor all came to pass.

Local Christians took their relics and buried them with honour in Damascus. However, they soon found their way to Rome where they were celebrated and venerated by many pilgrims. In the year 997, the Saxon king Otto III had the relics brought from Rome to Aachen in Germany, where they were enshrined in the Cathedral. The cultus of these two saints has been particularly popular among woodsmen and among gamblers, but in the 1300s with the approach of the Black Death, Germans began to pray to Saint Stephanida for protection from the plague, and several villages which sought her intercession were spared from the ravages of the disease. Today many are seeking her intercessions against the novel coronavirus, on account of the Latin form of her name, Saint Corona. Holy martyrs Viktōr and Stephanida, fearless witnesses to Christ before the pagans, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saints Viktōr and Stephanida of Damascus, Tone 4:

Your holy martyrs, O Lord,
Through their sufferings have received incorruptible crowns from You, our God.
For having Your strength, they laid low their adversaries,
And shattered the powerless boldness of dæmons.
Through their intercessions, save our souls!

The historiosophies of Hegel and Spengler, compared

Again, going back to Hegel and reading him with a bit more subtlety than I was wont to before, I am finding that he is indeed a much more complicated thinker than many of his conservative critics (even the Russian ones) allege. This much is true: he did believe that history had a progressive direction, and he did believe that we are moving towards truth. But he did not buy so wholly into the Whiggish myth of progress as some might imagine – which may be one reason why he continues to be so broadly misunderstood. He didn’t proclaim an ‘end of history’. Hegel did not pretend to know what the truth was or what the final unfolding of the Logos in history would look like, even if in his more chauvinistic moments he imagined that the German nation – what with its refined sense of social responsibility and its balanced constitutional Prussian monarchy – might, at some point in the future, attain to it. Also: the commonly-perpetuated idea of his system consisting of a triad of ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ in a continuous upbuilding form is not actually Hegel’s but Fichte’s – this ‘triad’ plays no rôle in Hegel’s philosophy of history. For Hegel the process by which the Logos unfolds in history is swathed in the mystical – much like Hölderlin’s! – and it is incomprehensible except in retrospect:

Wenn die Philosophie ihr Grau in Grau malt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens alt geworden, und mit Grau in Grau läßt sie sich nicht verjüngen, sondern nur erkennen. Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey-in-grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva begins its flight, only when the shades of twilight are gathering.

Hegel’s philosophy of history does posit an objective dimension, something which is not seen in the ontological grounding of the historiosophies of Liang Shuming or Oswald Spengler. Liang Shuming’s fundamental understanding of the workings of the cosmos – his metaphysics and ontology – was Buddhist, derived from Yogācāra and had as its basis a profound consciousness of the impermanence of any singular truth. Spengler’s ontological grounding was derived from Goethe and Nietzsche, and had an existentialist dimension: he agreed with Liang in his consciousness of impermanence of truth, but also claimed that the truth was something which had to inhere in the ‘great man’ in history. They have a similar form, however, to Hegel’s. Hegel does find within the tragœdies of history – the birth and life and death of civilisations – steps toward this truth. Hegel’s ‘reason’ may be cosmopolitan, universal and absolute; but the concrete instances through which this reason proceeds are entirely subjective: and here he is actually more in agreement with Spengler and Liang than he is with a rationalist and optimist like Kant. Hegel had little truck with democratic peace theory in his day. He would have far less with the neoconservative fever dreams of an eternal Pax Americana, despite some of these people attempting to claim him for themselves.

Even if he did not use the triad which is famously – though wrongly – attributed to him, Hegel saw reason unfolding in history through successions of historical stages, each one containing the seeds of its own destruction. This is something that Marx, by the way, borrowed directly from his teacher and never really revised, even when he ‘stood Hegel on his head’. It is to Hegel’s credit that his understanding of this unfolding did not shy away from instances of historical tragœdy.

It’s first necessary to understand that Hegel saw the unfolding of reason in the human life in terms similar to those of Confucius. The moral life is bound up in Sittlichkeit: one learns to be moral through the concrete habits and rituals of a particular setting. The child learns to be moral within the ambit of her family. As the family interacts with neighbours, reason is elevated to the level of the Gesellschaft, the civil society. And as forms of civil society come into contact with each other, reason becomes the responsibility of the state. For Hegel, this is the highest expression of human reason, as it develops organically within the human life. Hegel shares, at least in this case, in the romanticism of Spengler (which is in fact also the romanticism of Goethe, Hölderlin and – by Spengler’s logic – Plato), insofar as he considers the development of reason, even within states, to be an organic, living process – a natural extension of the imperfect reasoning of the individual.

He was well aware, indeed painfully aware, that instances of concrete reason expressed within states would come to loggerheads with each other. Hegel was not a pacifist, and still less an advocate of Kant’s ideology of democratic peace. For Hegel, the fact of the existence of states lent itself to a realist understanding of foreign policy. Even if there was an absolute, an objective truth out there, it could only ever be imperfectly grasped by the organisms of states, cultures, civilisations… and wars between states were the result of this imperfect striving after reason. Even so, Hegel is trying to bridge romanticism with realism in a particular way. Hegel does not (and with good reason!) want to give up the ultimate teleological bent of his project. Despite his doubts about the ability of reason to be finalised within history, he is still far too good a rationalist – still too good a disciple of Kant – to be able to bring to bear an ontological critique of Kantian Vernunft.

Spengler approaches history from a similar direction, but he radicalises the imperfection of human reason when he cites Goethe and his philosophy of becoming – in fact, an iteration of Platonic philosophy – as inspiration for his approach to history. By focussing entirely on the specific, the concrete, the living expressions of culture, in other words – rather than fixed principles which are for him the forms of the non-living – Spengler is adapting a sceptical, non-objective ontology similar to Liang Shuming’s yogic dharmism and, in a more attenuated way, Konstantin Leont’ev’s highly-stylised and -æstheticised Byzantinism. The wry echoes of Friedrich Nietzsche in the thought of all three men are not accidental… but there is another, unacknowledged source for this ontology. Spengler begins describing time in ways that carry eerie echoes of his French contemporary, Henri Bergson. Spengler comes to strikingly similar conclusions to Bergson in L'Évolution créatrice, about the ways in which the intuitive approach to history (which he prefers) is at odds with a ‘mechanical’, ratiocinating, frame-by-frame historical analysis.

We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species. No one, looking at the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this moment, now, about to start on its true and proper course. No one as he sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so for two or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, we take our ideas as to the course of the future from an unbridled optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e. organic, experience, and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof but on predilection…

I was originally brought to reflect on this fundamental question of our world-consciousness through noticing how present-day historians as they fumble round tangible events, things-become, believe themselves to have already grasped History, the happening, the becoming itself. This is a prejudice common to all who proceed by reason and cognition, as against intuitive perception… Life, perpetually fulfilling itself as an element of becoming, is what we call ‘the present’, and it possesses that mysterious property of ‘direction’, which men have tried to rationalise by means of the enigmatic word ‘time’.

Personally, I feel am closer to Hegel (and Plato, and thus also Marx) on this question than I am to Spengler (or Bergson). I do acknowledge the Logos, as an objective Truth that precedes and undergirds the entire cosmos, and which lies in wait for us at the end of all things. But that is not to say that Spengler does not have a point. The question of personality in history is something which Spengler takes very much to heart, examining the force of personality in the ‘great men’ of history: Cæsar, Napoleon and Cecil Rhodes. Hegel was clearly not immune to this sort of historical thinking either, having famously peered out from Jena toward a certain Corsican on horseback! But Spengler looks directly to this kind of dynamism and force of the individual will in history in itself, stamping marks upon entire epochs, particularly enjoying the majesty of the power vertical and the flourishing diversity of forms and modes of life that takes place underneath it. He is drawn, just as Glaukon in the Republic is drawn, to question the ability of justice to provide the fine things in the life of a city.

We have a need for both the Hegelian, and the Spenglerian-Bergsonian, attitudes toward history. We should never fool ourselves into believing glibly that our current social order is in some way the most important, most moral, most rational. Spengler’s bucket of cold water on that conceit is fully warranted – but so are his (and Bergson’s) gentle reminders that we historians are not so much clock-winders and calendar-turners as we are custodians of a living garden as well as of botanical samples that were once alive. I would like to think – but I cannot know for sure until I’ve finally tackled Hegel’s Geschichtsphilosophie itself – that the elder German would agree. Spengler’s here-and-now, present-focussed historical consciousness is badly needed in our day, as both ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ fool themselves into believing we can either reason our way backward to a more rational point of national glory in our past, or reason our way forward painlessly into an ever more-liberated Gnostic-libertine ‘woke’ future. But we can also use a modified Hegelian assurance that there is an end, that our work even if not complete does have a certain final form. Even – and especially – if we do not know what that is!

A look back at Hegel

For various reasons, I’ve been seeing if I can take stock of certain of my intellectual formations and habits of mind. One of the biggest ones is the impact reading GWF Hegel – who I idol-worshipped as a college student, and later rebelled against – had on me, and what stuck with me from him. Going back and reading some of my old textbooks and articles from my college days has been interesting, if a bit wince-inducing considering my immaturity. My college philosophy professor, Dr Chris Latiolais, correctly diagnosed – when I reacted with a kind of overbearing disgust to some of the ideas that I encountered in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – that a lot of what drove my philosophical inquiry was a political anger against George W Bush and Dick Cheney. I had been looking for, and thought I had found in Hegel’s thinking, something of a radical answer to the ills of an American culture that had produced neoconservatism… and something of a way out. Of course, had I been a bit more astute as a college student, I might have noticed that the neoconservatives themselves had onboarded more than a few of Hegel’s conceits – but when one is younger and more self-assured of one’s own rightness, such delicious ironies are rather lost.

One of the drawbacks of putting my philosophical and religious ideas onto a blog like The Heavy Anglo Orthodox, is that it’s necessarily fragmentary, and I often have to go haring back to fetch one or other particular fragment and hold it up to the light to determine its worth. Hegel was a systemic thinker – which I very much am not. This blog post does not purport to be a full and exhaustive treatment of that system, or of its impact on the way I think or act; it’s more than anything a bit of a retrospective on the ways in which some of the more salient points of Hegel’s thinking have guided me to where I am now.

So, in that spirit, looking back at what Hegel was doing, I can certainly see how deep the impressions of certain elements of his thinking on my intellectual development have been (and still are)! For one thing, even though Dr Latiolais tried to steer me in a direction he thought I was headed anyway – into the Marxist ideas of the New Left – my basic philosophical instincts have nonetheless remained ‘right’-Hegelian. The conceit that most drew me back ad fontes to Plato a couple of years ago, for example, was completely Hegelian. I had been convinced of two things: firstly, that we had arrived at a disastrous, civilisation-breaking moment in our history; and secondly, that we weren’t going to politicise our way out of it without some kind of grounding in metaphysics. I realise now that I was simply slipping, again, into a well-travelled wake that my Swabian shangbei had ridden long before me, writing as he was from a vantage-point in which the European ancien regime was breaking apart and in which forms of scepticism like those of Hume and Kant were ruling the day in intellectual venues.

Like Hegel, I desired a rational understanding (or Begriff) of my world and of my cultural moment – the failures of liberalism in particular. And like Hegel, I felt sure that there needed to be a metaphysical grounding for that understanding. And so, just as Hegel seems to have set out to redeem the metaphysical neo-Platonist and Christoplatonist tradition from Kant’s wicked sceptical clutches (and as Marx later set out to redeem Aristotle from Hegel’s idealist clutches!), so too I was setting out to redeem Plato from those who were reading him as an apologist for obscurantism, tyranny and unfreedom – and possibly in the process finding within Plato a kind of key for ‘discerning the times’. As I said after my year of reading Plato, I found much, much more than that: I found a questioner and a doctor for some of my own intellectual and personal vices and hang-ups. In this way the broad outlines of my philosophical process still seem to have some resemblance to Hegel’s.

Other aspects of Hegelian thinking have always been kept near the forefront for me. The rather messy idea of Sittlichkeit (the situated ethical life), articulated both in Hegel’s Phänomenologie and in his Philosophie des Rechts, has always been close to the surface of my embrace of both epistemological and ethical communitarianism: our awareness of moral commitments in fact stems from, and depends on, the concrete, down-and-dirty exigencies of lived customs, traditions and habits. It is, in fact, the single most charming point of his philosophical system for me, and it reflects what is most beautiful in Hegel’s southern German upbringing: I cannot help but feel that Hegel must have had something in mind, of the hospitality and warm-heartedness of the old Swabian Sitten when he came up with this term. Hegel propounded his Sittlichkeit, in part, as a response to the categorical imperative, the absolute Kantian Moralität which was to be fully derived from the powers of reasoning. I was not slow – growing as I had been in awareness of Chinese philosophy – to connect the Hegelian Sittlichkeit in my thinking with the Confucian concern for liyue 禮樂 or ‘rites and music’, which Confucius held to be the intermediating force by which the self’s sense of right and wrong was to be tutored.

For Hegel, as for Confucius, a person’s sense of right and wrong is conditioned first by her contact with her family, and the concrete habits they build together. Thereafter, ethical behaviour is conditioned by a broader circle of neighbours and contacts, the Gesellschaft or ‘civil society’. Only thereafter, when differing neighbourhoods and bodies of civil custom come into contact with each other and have to deal with each other do common ethical guidelines become codified in the field of law – under a state. Hegel’s concentric circles of ethical development share something very much in common with Zengzi’s Doctrine of the Mean, which places the primary burden for moral development upon the family.

But it was precisely this awareness of similarity and overlap between Hegelian ethics and Confucian ethics – though not an identification of the two with each other – that made me begin to rebel against Hegel on certain points. Hegel himself had a certain patronising and belittling attitude toward Asia and its civilisational potentials (a belittling attitude which sadly extended to the Eastern Roman Empire), which he inherited (I believe) from his French tutors and which he bequeathed to his pupil Marx – who himself would come back to revise that belief. I could begin to see his shamelessly-triumphal attitude toward history, and his arrogant attitude that it was the German worldview and German values that should and must prevail in the teleological process of history. In fact, a more careful study of history itself in various places of the world led me to doubt the idea – which I attributed to Hegel, but on which point Hegel was in fact much more subtle than I previously gave him credit – that the teleological outcome of human history had been foreordained and we were all being inexorably swept toward it. I rebelled particularly against the idea that reason – Vernunft – was something which consisted in itself without being attached to a personal, sittlich agent. Here, I suspect I may have been guided by a naïve or simplistic reading of Hegelian ideas. At the same time, I could not deny the justice of the Slavophils’ semi-Schellingian critique of Hegel, that he did more than a little indulge a certain sense of German chauvinism, and that he was indeed carried away by the self-evident perfection of his own rationality. To him, the future of humankind did belong to German state and the German idea, just as for the neoconservative readers of his pupil Fukuyama, the future did and must belong to the American state and the American idea.

Still, I think Hegel may have been far more cautious on the historiosophical point than his critics – particularly those in the vein of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, whom I also consider to be influential on me – have given him credit for. Hegel did believe that there was a telos to human endeavour. He was a firm believer in the Absolute, in the Logos, just as his classical masters were. Here I can hardly blame him. And he did have a firm, postmillennarian belief in reason and believed reason to be the impelling force driving us toward that telos. I do demur from Hegel here on Orthodox Christian, personalist grounds, but let’s give him his due and consider his position honestly. I suspect that it’s a caricature, driven by careless readers approaching him from a hermeneutic of suspicion, that he subscribed to an idea that the final triumph of reason was something that would be circumscribed within history and fully accessible to (German) knowledge. For Hegel, situated customs, traditions and habits were the place from which all moral progress had to start – and these things did limit the knowledge available even to rational, deliberative states like Germany. Hegel was, on this point, neither the monstrous totalitarian nor nearly the hyper-modernist archapostle of Progress with a capital ‘P’ that some of his critics make him out to be.

Even in this discussion, though, I’m inadvertently showing additional layers to my Hegelian philosophical upbringing in the sense that I have long had this interest in the inner workings of history and the social-historical ways which impel human movement on the scale of societies and nations. Hegel’s style of thinking has guided me in these directions, more so than his stated philosophy of history, or his concrete commitments to particular political forms. Here too, though, Hegel’s socially-minded constitutional monarchism is something with which I still tend to sympathise… for similar reasons, I confess, to those on which I still find his concept of Sittlichkeit to be beautiful and right and good.

So… even if I tend toward the older Christian belief, that history is in fact a ‘long defeat’ to use Tolkien’s wording, and that the final victory of the Logos is something ever only glimpsed ‘in a mirror darkly’ within history, it is still worth taking stock of Hegel’s system and some of the good points which can be salvaged from it. Hegel’s intimations about the sittlich nature of human ethics actually point to an area in which his belief in Vernunft and Kantian Moralität are conditioned and almost humble! And his unwillingness to ascribe rationality to anything above the state – and indeed, even that rationality only ever imperfectly, because no state was capable of correctly predicting the whole future on its own terms – actually tends to undercut the common caricature of Hegel as being the overbearing chauvinistic triumphalist and determinist par excellence. Hegel is still worth being read seriously, even if reading him is more than occasionally like trying to scale a mountain.

Holy Father Sergios I, Pope of Rome

Saint Sergios of Rome

Today, the eighth of September, is the feast-day of the great eighth-century Syrian Pope of the Roman Church during its ‘Byzantine’ period, Saint Sergios. His family was Antiochian and sources universally acknowledge him as Syrian. He was known in particular for his vigorous interest in the English mission, and thus along with his somewhat elder contemporary Saint Theodore of Tarsos he may be considered one of the vibrant historical threads connecting the churches of Antioch and Old England. Saint Sergios is unsurprisingly venerated by both the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

Saint Sergios [L. Sergius, Gk. Σέργιος, Ar. Sarjiyûs سرجيوس] was the son of Antiochian parents – his father is named as Tiberios in the Latin sources. His family may have been fleeing the Râšidah conquests of the Levant, but they landed in Palermo in Sicily, in which city he was born in the year 650. He was educated in Sicily, moved to Rome in the 670s under Pope Adeodatus II, and ordained as a priest by the friend of the poor Pope Saint Leon II (who is also venerated by Orthodox Christians). He was appointed to a position as the cardinal-priest of the Chiesa di Santa Susanna at the Baths of Diocletian in Rome.

In 687, following the repose of Pope Conon, there was a succession crisis in the Papacy which led to two popes being elected in rapid succession: an archdeacon named Paschal and a priest named Theodoros, who were leaders of competing factions. In the wake of this competition, which threatened to blow up into an outright feud, the priests and cardinals of Rome – in order to broker a peace – chose the cardinal-priest Sergios as a neutral candidate to the Papacy, and he was accordingly elected Pope on the fifteenth of December in that year. Following this, the archdeacon Paschal went to Johannes Platinus, the agent of the Byzantine Emperor in Italy and also the Exarch of Ravenna, with a large sum of money demanding to be reinstated as Pope. Platinus thereafter did what he could to sabotage the pontificate of Saint Sergios – including trying to extort gold from the new Pope, and when that failed, stealing the holy vessels for the Eucharist and claiming they were possessed. (The common people of Rome very nearly revolted against Platinus for this abuse, but he restored the vessels after some more-or-less peaceable bartering.)

In his early years as Pope, Saint Sergios took an active interest in the English mission which had been begun by his predecessor in office Saint Gregory the Dialogist. He defended the reputation of Saint Wilfrið of York and ordered Ealdferð to restore him to his former bishopric in 691. In particular, he enjoyed significant contact with the West Saxon clergy including, likely, Saint Hædde of Winchester. It was at the latter’s behest that Cædwalla King was brought to Rome. Saint Sergios met him there and personally baptised him on the tenth of April; Cædwalla died ten days later of an old battle wound, and he was buried in St Peter’s Basilica. The Syrian pope also, meeting him with great warmth of brotherly affection, anointed and blessed the Northumbrian monk Saint Willibrord, who would carry the light of the Gospel among the Frisians.

Saint Sergios had gotten off on something of a wrong foot with the Exarch of Ravenna, which meant that politically speaking he had to toe a fairly fine line. Emperor Justinian convoked a synod in Trullo which addressed certain disciplinary and ecclesiastical issues – this council is considered a follow-up to the Fifth Œcumenical Council and is thus sometimes referred to as the Quinisext Council. No doctrinal matters were decided at this council, and the Roman pontiffs have generally taken an ambivalent stance on the canons produced. This goes back to Saint Sergios himself.

When the legate of Saint Sergios at Trullo, Basil of Gortyna in Crete, brought back the canons of the council at Trullo for Saint Sergios to sign, he refused to do so on the grounds that they were ‘lacking authority’ and that they introduced ‘novel errors’ in Church. However, later Roman bishops (such as Popes Constantine and John VIII) would later claim that Saint Sergios in fact did accept some of the canons of Trullo and cited them as authoritative. What appears likely is that Saint Sergios accepted the first fifty apostolic canons of the Quinisext Council, but not the latter canons that established Byzantine ecclesiastical disciplines as universally normative.

However, even though he was not willing to give up the local disciplines of the Western Rite, Saint Sergios was keen on maintaining both ecclesiastical and political unity with Constantinople. When Emperor Justinian II moved to arrest Saint Sergios’s legates, John of Portus and Bonifatius Consiliarius – and later ordered the bodyguard of Saint Sergios, a man named Zakarias, to arrest the Pope and deliver him to Constantinople. However, this attempt failed. Zakarias was thwarted by the efforts of both the Exarch of Ravenna and the local populace, and Zakarias very nearly lost his life. However, Saint Sergios himself forgave the Emperor and Zakarias, and did his level best to preserve the peace and good relations with New Rome.

Saint Sergios was not merely a political actor or a particularly active missionary, however. He was a noted lover of Liturgical forms and Church singing. He did much to enrich the life of the Church of Rome and even brought some usages of the Byzantine Rite into the Western Church, acting in the realm of sacred art and music as a bridge between Old Rome and New. He renovated a number of cathedrals in Rome during his Papacy. He was the first Western hierarch to celebrate the Eastern feast of the Elevation of the True Cross in the wake of the discovery of a piece of the True Cross in the Basilica of Saint Peter. He reposed in the Lord on the eighth of September, 701. Holy hierarch Sergios, peacemaker, friend of the poor and of the English Church, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

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.

Holy Hierarchs Barsēs and Eulogios of Edessa, and Prōtogenēs of Carrhæ

Edessa, now ar-Ruhâ in Turkey

The twenty-fifth of August is the feast-day of three holy confessing bishops of Mesopotamia, Saints Barsēs and Eulogios of Edessa, and Saint Prōtogenēs of Carrhæ. These bishops suffered under the unwise rule of the haughty and overconfident Arian Emperor Valens, who fell in battle against the Goths under Fritigern at Hadrianople in 378. Of these three, Saint Barsēs, similarly to Saint John Chrysostom, died in exile. The other two were returned to their sees under the saintly Emperor Theodosius and finished the course of their earthly lives in peace. However, the Church has never forgotten their sacrifices for the Incarnate truth of Christ’s full manhood and full Godhood.

Saint Barsēs [Gk. Βάρσης] and Saint Eulogios [Gk. Εὐλόγιος] were Syriac monks of extraordinary virtue and holiness in Edessa. According to the Church historian Sōzomenos, both men were given the honourable title of bishop in their monastery, not so that they could rule over a see, but rather in recognition of their many merits.

During the reign of Valens, there was a fierce persecution of the Christians who accepted the Nicene Creed. Because Saint Barsēs was among the most vocal supporters of the Council of Nicæa and, thus, opponents of the doctrines of Arius, the Roman authorities under Valens evicted him from his monastery in Edessa and had him exiled to the island of ‘Arâd (now al-Muḥarraq in Bahrain), which at that time was settled by Orthodox Christians of Syro-Phœnician and Arabic descent. The holy monk and bishop was greeted with great enthusiasm by the Christians of the island and treated with great honour. The authorities then had him banished further still, to the city of Pemdje (now an archæological site near al-Bahnasa) in Ægypt. Here too the Christians of the city greeted him with great warmth and hospitality. The exasperated Valens had Barsēs exiled still further away, to the remote location of Thenon. Saint Barsēs, physically exhausted by this succession of exiles, reposed in the Lord en route to this place.

Valens appointed an Arian named Lukos to the bishopric of Edessa. Lukos turned out to be a ruthless oppressor and persecutor of the Nicene Christians. He dismissed all the parish priests and replaced them with Arians, such that all the church buildings were under his control. This being the case, there was little for the Nicene Christians to do but to gather together in the open air outside the city of Edessa to celebrate the Divine Liturgy. When word of this reached Valens, he cruelly ordered the præfect of Edessa, a man named Modestos, to seize anyone found gathering for worship outside the city and have them put to death at once by beheading.

Modestos, who was in truth a kind-hearted and sensible man, baulked at this order. He met in secret with the leaders of the Nicene Orthodox Christians in Edessa, informed them of his orders, and besought them not to leave the city for worship. But this had the opposite effect of the one he intended. Desirous of martyrdom, the Christians of Edessa came out of the city on the appointed day and met in their accustomed place. Modestos brought the Roman soldiery there and grimly prepared to attack the Christian assembly. However, when he saw a woman running to the place with her infant son so as not to deprive the infant the opportunity for a martyr’s salvation, Modestos had a change of heart and called off his soldiers. He begged the Emperor to spare the laity and instead only make an example from among the clergy.

Modestos brought the monk Eulogios – who was trusted by all of the assembly at Edessa – along with eighty other clergy of the city before Valens. The Emperor ordered them to enter into communion with Lukos and submit themselves to his spiritual authority, but none of them would do so. Then Valens had them chained, paraded through the streets in disgrace, and then cast into a nearby Thracian prison. But as they were led through the streets, the faithful of Thrace took pity upon the imprisoned clergy, succoured them, gave them food and bandaged their wounds. Seeing this, Valens became infuriated, and ordered them to be sent two-by-two into exile.

Bishop Saint Eulogios was sent into exile together with Saint Prōtogenēs [Gk. Πρωτογενής], a cleric from Carrhæ (modern Ḥarrân in Turkey), who had suffered a similar fate to the confessors of Edessa. The two of them were sent into exile in Ægypt: the city of Antinoöpolis (modern aš-Šayḵ ‘Ibâda), which was then still a bastion of paganism. Here it was hoped that they would suffer ignominy and death among the hostile non-Christians, but the two holy men instead lived humbly among the pagans, taught them about Christ and patiently converted them to Christ in the fulness of time. When Valens fell in battle against Fritigern, and was succeeded by Theodosios, both Eulogios and Prōtogenēs were found alive and well, and were restored to Edessa. Here they lived out the rest of their natural lives, and departed to the Lord in peace. Holy hierarchs Barsēs, Eulogios and Prōtogenēs, confessors who suffered for the truth of Christ’s Godhood, pray unto the only lover of mankind that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saints Barsēs, Eulogios and Prōtogenēs, Tone 8:

Champions of Orthodoxy, teachers of purity and of true worship,
The enlighteners of the universe and the adornment of hierarchs:
All-wise fathers Barsēs and Eulogios,
Your teachings have gleamed with light upon all things.
Intercede before Christ God to save our souls.