Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke

Saint Luke the Evangelist

Today is the feast-day in the Orthodox Church of Saint Luke the Evangelist. The importance of Saint Luke to the development of the Christian faith and the Orthodox Church in particular cannot be overstated. He authored two of the books of Holy Scripture – the Gospel account bearing his name, and also the Book of Acts: the single largest contribution to the Greek-language Scriptures by any single author. It is on account of Luke that we even have a comprehensive account of Christ’s early life, and it is also on account of Luke that we have an account of what happened to the followers of Christ in the immediate wake of His Crucifixion and Resurrection. Luke’s account of Christ emphasises the social and historical dimensions of His life on earth, and also the universal importance of His ministry. Although devotion to this great saint is universal, he was born and raised in Antioch, and thus is glorified and venerated among the Antiochian saints.

Saint Luke [Gk. Λουκᾶς, L. Lucas, Ar. Lûqâ لوقا], a Greek by parentage, was raised in Antioch. Luke was probably from a fairly well-to-do family, because he was versant in Greek philosophy, in art, and in the study of medicine. He became a physician upon reaching adulthood, and having been in contact with Jews among his patients in Antioch he may have been drawn to their prophetic religion, and may have come to believe in the Jewish God. According to the tradition of the Church, when Luke was a young man he had occasion to visit Jerusalem, and was called out to the nearby village of ‘Imwâs – which is to say, Emmaus – near ar-Ramla:

Now behold, two of them were travelling that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was seven miles from Jerusalem. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. So it was, while they conversed and reasoned, that Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were restrained, so that they did not know Him. (Lk 24:13-16)

The companion of Luke on this journey is named in his account as Kleopas, identified in Orthodox tradition as the brother of Saint Joseph. Luke does not name himself as the other companion – in keeping with the literary custom used also by Saint Mark and by Saint John. Jesus, who was disguised such that Kleopas did not know Him, asked the two men why they were sad. Kleopas had entertained the hopes, common among Jesus’s disciples, that the Messiah would come and restore the righteous reign of the Hasmonean Kingdom, and rule in the name of the Heir of David in perpetuity. After the Crucifixion, these worldly, political hopes were utterly dashed. He said to Jesus that ‘certain women of our company’ had come to the tomb and found it empty, but in so saying he revealed his unbelief.

Jesus rebuked him and Luke together for not having believed what the women had told them, which was true, and then began to expound those passages in the Hebrew prophets which hint at what the Messiah must suffer. When the three of them came to ‘Imwâs, Jesus wanted to go on, but Luke and Kleopas insisted that he stay with them. Jesus agreed, and when He came inside, and broke bread and blessed it, then all of a sudden Kleopas recognised Him, and Luke knew Him, and at once He vanished from sight. Thus Saint Luke was among the first to be given the honour to behold the Risen Lord, despite being a Gentile and despite being a newcomer to Jerusalem.

Saint Luke was quickly welcomed into the company of the Apostles, as he is numbered among the Seventy. The next we hear about Saint Luke is from the lips, or rather the pen, of Saint Paul – in whose company Luke was constant in brotherly and devoted attendance. He is mentioned in the benediction of Paul’s epistle to Philemon, along with Demas and the saints Mark and Aristarchos. He appears in a similar litany of ‘fellow workers’ in the benediction of the Pauline epistle to the Colossians. At the end of his second epistle to Timotheos, Paul complains that Demas and Saint Titos and Saint Kreskēs have all abandoned him, and that ‘Λουκᾶς ἐστιν μόνος μετ’ ἐμοῦ’ – ‘Only Luke is with me’.

If we take Luke’s account of himself in Acts as authoritative – that is to say, those places in Acts where he refers to the Apostles in the first-person rather than in the third-person – then we can assume that he accompanied Saint Paul from Trōada until he departs from Philippoi, where Saint Luke evidently stayed until Saint Paul returned there. From then on Luke accompanied the chief of the Apostles until his martyrdom.

The community of Christians put Saint Luke’s talents to good use. He wrote one Gospel account – in fact, the only account to be addressed to a specific person, Theophilos – and the Acts of the Apostles as a seamless continuation of the Gospel narrative. The Orthodox tradition identifies Theophilos with the governor of Achaïa in Greece, who went by that name. (This was one of the places that Luke visited after the martyrdom of Saint Paul.) In writing his Gospel, Saint Luke relied on primary source documents and eyewitness testimony. He may indeed have relied upon the eyewitness testimony of the Most Holy Theotokos, and he even depicted the likeness of the Most Holy Theotokos – thus becoming the first iconographer of the Church. As a historian, Saint Luke is meticulous, thorough, and responsible to the facts: his knowledge of contemporary political and physical gæography is impressive by Classical standards. (As it should be: he travelled in person to many of the places he speaks of!) Although he uses certain figurative language and inflates some figures to suit a didactic objective, this practice is fully in keeping with the histories of Herodotos and Thoukydidēs.

Saint Luke’s primary themes were the universality of the Gospel message – extended even to women, Samaritans, Gentiles, lepers and tax collectors; the particular care and concern Christ had for sinners; and the identification of Christ with the poor and sorrowful. Mary’s ode of praise, with all its social potentials, is found in the very first chapter of Saint Luke’s Gospel, setting the tone for his work. It is indeed Saint Luke who most strongly emphasises – in chapter 12, verse 48 of his Gospel, for example – the particular responsibility that those who enjoy material prosperity and political power have, to meet the needs of those who are materially poor.

If we consider Saint Mark to have been the founder of the allegorical-symbolic and philosophical Alexandrian school of exegesis (as the Copts claim), then it seems altogether fair to consider Saint Luke to have been the spiritual progenitor of the social-historical Antiochian school of exegesis. We can see præfigurations of Saint John Chrysostom in the Gospel of Luke; his concerns are much the same. Saint Luke emphasises the concrete, the factual, the present-right-in-front-of-you, in his Gospel account – and he also grounds his Gospel in the social concerns of the early Christian community. Note that Christ first appears right in front of Luke on the road to ‘Imwâs; also that He chides Luke for not having believed the women who were, in fact, right there to see the empty tomb!

According to Holy Tradition, Saint Luke was beheaded by the Roman government under Nero while preaching the Gospel. His grave and his final resting-place were located in Thēbai in Boiōtia, Greece. The relics of the Saint were plundered from Thēbai at some point in the Middle Ages – possibly during the Fourth Crusade – and brought to Padua, to the Benedictine Abbazia di Santa Giustina. The head of Saint Luke was bought by Karel IV of Bohemia, and brought to the Cathedral of Saint Vitus in Prague, where it still rests.

In 1992 the then-Metropolitan Ierōnymos of Thēba (now Archbishop Ierōnymos II of Greece), made a request of the Catholic bishop Antonio Mattiazzo of Padua to return a significant part of the relics of Saint Luke to their rightful resting place in Greece. As a result of his request, the relics in both Padua and Prague were subjected to a scientific investigation and compared. It was determined that the relics belonged to a man of Syrian descent, elderly at the age of death but vigorously built, who had died sometime between the years 72 and 416. The skull in Saint Vitus Cathedral and the body in the Abbey of Saint Justina were determined to have belonged to the same man. Bishop Mattiazzo, in a touchingly selfless gesture of goodwill, sent to Metropolitan Ierōnymos the rib of the man which rested closest to his heart, to be venerated at Thēba. Holy evangelist and apostle Luke, physician and iconographer who met the Risen Lord face-to-face, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion to Saint Luke the Evangelist, Tone 5:

Let us praise with sacred songs the holy Apostle Luke,
The recorder of the joyous Gospel of Christ
And the scribe of the Acts of the Apostles,
For his writings are a testimony of the Church of Christ:
He is the physician of human weaknesses and infirmities.
He heals the wounds of our souls,
And constantly intercedes for our salvation!

Monastery of Saint Luke, Thēba, Greece

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.

Saint Kliment Ohridski, Enlightener of Bulgaria

Saint Kliment of Ohrid

The twenty-seventh of July is the feast of Saint Kliment of Ohrid. Kliment is of particular importance as one of the chief disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius and thus one of the Seven Saints of early Slavdom, who continued his predecessors’ work in creating a written language – the Cyrillic alphabet – for the Slavic people. However, his significance in the history of the Orthodox faith is much broader. He represents, both for the Slavic cultures and for the Orthodox world more generally, a bottom-up missiology that placed the Church closer to the lives of the common people instead of the nobility.

Our fathers among the Saints Cyril and Methodius were commissioned by the notoriously hedonistic Emperor Michael III as well as by Saint Photios, to answer a request by Saint Rastislav of Great Moravia for ‘teachers’ who could instruct local priests in the local tongue. On Rastislav’s part, this was a political move aimed at preserving his independence from the Frankish Empire, which had begun sending Latin- and Frankish-speaking missionary priests into Moravian territory with the purpose of undermining his rule. However, for the holy brothers, this was a God-sent opportunity to preach the Gospel among their mother’s folk, and to do it in such a way that it would be readily understood. The two of them had already developed an alphabet called Glagolitic which, though unwieldy, was nonetheless distinctly well-suited to representing the phonemes of the Slavonic language in written form.

In Great Moravia the two brothers set to work at once preaching the Gospel directly to the people and teaching pupils from among them who were capable of mastering the new alphabet. They were accompanied by several disciples and followers, who lived with them as ascetics. Saint Gorazd (the namesake of the holy Czech bishop who would be martyred by the Nazis for his incidental rôle in Operation Anthropoid) was the favourite and right-hand disciple of Saint Methodius, who would eventually succeed him as Bishop among the Slavs. Gorazd, along with Kliment [L. Clemens, Eng. Clement, OCS Климєнтъ, Bulg. Климент] and Naum, was ordained as a priest in Rome at the same time as Cyril was there; the other two great Slavic saints Angelarii and Sava were ordained as deacons.

They assisted Methodius in his mission to convert the Slavs, under hostile political conditions. Saint Methodius and his followers were persecuted ruthlessly by the Frankish clergy acting on the orders of the East Frankish king Louis II. Methodius was placed under arrest, and only on the inquiry and order of Pope John VIII was he released. However, after Saint Methodius reposed in 885, Pope Stephen V reversed his predecessor’s decision. Under the fanatical Bishop Wiching, the Franks – holding to the notion that only Latin, Greek and Hebrew were fit to be used in ecclesiastical settings – set out to systematically destroy his work in Moravia. His students were arrested, beaten, tortured, sold into slavery in Venice or chased out of Moravia. Saint Kliment, together with Saint Naum, managed to escape into Bulgaria, which had only recently – and shakily – accepted Christianity.

The Great Prince of the Bulgars, Saint Boris Mihail, welcomed Saints Kliment and Naum into his realm – for reasons, in fact, similar to those Rastislav had done. The priests sent by Constantinople into the newly-converted Bulgarian realm spoke only Greek and had no interest in teaching the populace. Kliment and Naum were tasked with setting up schools in Bulgaria in Pliska and Kutmichevitsa. Saint Naum taught in Pliska, where Greek Churchly documents were translated into Slavonic, and which was broadly dedicated to literary and practical arts. The school which Saint Kliment founded in Kutmichevitsa was one in which he trained local Slavic boys and men for the priesthood. Kliment was chosen as teacher here, both on account of his modest, ascetic and God-loving way of life, and on account of his natural affinity with children and tireless energy. During the years in which he taught at Kutmichevitsa, he trained as many as 3,500 Slavic priests.

After Tsar Boris abdicated in favour of his son Symeon, the new king called a council in Preslav at which he tasked the Saints with developing a simplified script for the Slavic language, which would become the Cyrillic alphabet. Although Saint Kliment was instrumental in undertaking this work, he apparently didn’t appreciate the demand that he improve and ‘Hellenise’ the work of his beloved teachers, and he was somewhat estranged from Tsar Symeon as a result. He was also appointed Bishop of Dremvitsa – an outlying see – in 893. He laboured as bishop well into old age, and eventually retired to a monastery he had founded in Ohrid where he continued his translation work from Greek into Slavic, including significant portions of the Pentecostarion. Saint Kliment reposed in the Lord on the twenty-seventh of July in the year 916. He has an additional day of commemoration on the twenty-fifth of November, the feast-day of his patron, Pope Saint Clement of Rome.

The life of Saint Kliment was compiled in Greek at the end of the eleventh century by Saint Teofilakt of Ohrid. Saint Teofilakt himself drew upon older ‘folk’ tradition in Bulgaria and upon, perhaps, an Old Church Slavonic text which is no longer extant. One English translation of this Life comes from the massive and important work of translation undertaken by Kiril Petkov.

It bears stressing that in Bulgaria prior to its Christianisation, the ruling class still largely spoke a Turkic language – one which is actually closely related to the modern Chuvash language spoken in Russia. Their ruler was called a khaghan and the noblemen were called boila, tarkhan, bagain – all terms derived from Turkic. By working in the Slavic language, Saint Kliment and Saint Naum were very deliberately orienting themselves to the service and uplift of the people of the zemya – that is, the peasantry – who occupied the bottom social stratum of the Bulgarian state and who actually spoke the Slavonic language. The insistence on an educational model which made Bulgarian Slavic, rather than Bulgar Turkic, the preferred language of the priesthood, in fact gave the peasantry a good deal more power and respect than they had previously had, and indeed reduced the distance between the nobility and the peasantry. Ironically, one of the unfortunate long-term effects of Saint Kliment’s mission was that the Bulgar Turkic language faced extinction as more and more of the Bulgarian nobility identified themselves with the clerical language, with its new alphabet and profound cultural power.

It would be something of a category error to make Saint Kliment out to be a proto-distributist or a Christian socialist. However, it is necessary to understand that to the modern Bulgarian people, the Seven Saints are nonetheless an empowering and inspiring symbol for the great mass of the narod. Holy equal-to-the-apostles Kliment, enlightener and teacher of the Bulgarians, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion to Saint Kliment of Ohrid, Tone 4:

With thy discourses thou didst guide the nations to the Faith of Christ,
And by thy works thou didst lift thyself up to divine life,
O holy hierarch Kliment, equal of the apostles,
Shin¬ing forth miracles upon those who approach thee with faith,
And all-gloriously illumining the Church with signs.
Wherefore, we glorify thine honored memory.

Monastery of Saints Clement and Panteleimon, Ohrid, Northern Macedonia

Killer: a cab driver’s life in interesting times

Marat (Talgat Asetov) in Killer

If there’s one English phrase that makes every Asian studies major and every China hand wince, it’s this: ‘May you live in interesting times’. Unfortunately, it belongs to a considerable collection of pseudo-Confucian aphorisms and ancient Chinese proverbs of dubious origin, which have accumulated in Western languages over the decades and centuries as something of a relic of chinoiserie: attributing wisdoms both earthy and mystical to a mistily-distant exotic oriental antiquity. Unfortunately, despite even the heroic attempts by Russian Orthodox missionary churchmen to demystify China to their countrymen, it seems even post-Soviet artists have picked up a few of our bad old Jesuitical Western habits.

Sorry to go on a mini-rant, there, but my recent watch of Dárejan Ómirbaev’s 1998 film Killer [in Kazakh, Shilge; in French, Tueur à gages] brought it to mind. This orientalist cliché in its Russian form, ‘Не дай вам Бог жить в эпоху перемен’, serves as the film’s tagline. Even if this mudrost’ is incorrectly attributed, the point of the film is well made, and that point is nothing at all like the misty exoticism the tagline might otherwise imply. It also places Ómirbaev in a kind of spiritual kinship with modern Chinese indie filmmakers like Jia Zhangke. Here, Ómirbaev poignantly takes on the same concerns and themes that drive films like Shıza and Réketır, but he does so in a much darker and more understated way.

The story is straightforward. Ómirbaev details the unfortunate life of a cab driver, Marat (Talgat Asetov – who had a supporting role in Kaırat), who is forced into crime when he accidentally rear-ends a Mercedes and finds himself out of money to pay back the other driver. Events spiral out of control from there. His sister gets cheated out of her savings by fake investors, so his family can’t help him out. He has to borrow money from a loan shark. Marat gets beaten up by the Mercedes owner’s hirelings. He loses his job when his employer commits suicide. He tries to buy a new car, but it promptly gets stolen. His newborn son contracts an early childhood illness which demands expensive therapy. As he gets deeper and deeper into debt, his situation looking increasingly hopeless, the loan shark offers him a way out that involves taking a life.

Killer is uncompromisingly bleak from start to finish. The otherwise dingy palette is dominated by dark blues and dark reds. There is little of Kazakhstan’s natural beauty to be seen (unless it’s out the window of a moving car); instead, we are thrown into a world of decaying Soviet concrete apartments, garages and bars, illuminated where appropriate by fluorescent lights. There are hints early on in the film that drive home the destructive callousness of shock therapy and gangster capitalism that Ómirbaev tries to convey. The mathematics professor Marat works for, Berik Qaraqululy Qasımov, complains that there is no room for proper science in a society where everything is commercialised and where everyone is thrown into insecurity and chaos – and he later commits suicide in his office. ‘Don’t think about tomorrow,’ says the bartender Oleg, as he persuades Marat to borrow money from the loan shark Erjan Shakenovich at an interest rate of 1% per day. Everything is for sale under capitalism: honour, pride, and in the end even basic human morality. Just as in Shıza and Réketır, boxing is taken as the preferred cinematic metaphor for the brutal, cutthroat competition that pits the weak against the strong: though here, it’s portrayed on television screens.

The hopelessness of ordinary Kazakh life under this œconomic anarchy is signalled in several ways. First of all, in a lengthy scene at the beginning of the film, the professor Marat works for can’t find his way out of the studio where he’s giving an interview: in a maze of nondescript hallways, he has to ask for help twice to find his way out. It’s also interesting that Marat’s wife Aijan (Roksana Abuova) takes an almost completely passive rôle in the film. Marat’s family provides him motivation, but they have no place in the cutthroat world outside, and Marat himself is powerless to protect them from it.

In a scene that’s typical Ómirbaev, one of the minor characters recites a lengthy excerpt from Kafka. (I can forgive him for this, because the tension and tight pacing of the film, with Marat being hounded and stalked through his labyrinthine environs like the prey of an unseen predator, shows us that Ómirbaev really gets Kafka.) Of course, it wouldn’t be an Ómirbaev movie, either, if the main character didn’t lose a fight and get beaten up, as happens to Marat off-screen when he tries to stop the thieves who steal his car. Ómirbaev also gives us repeated dream sequences: in Marat’s dreams he goes up to a rooftop, looking to throw himself off. In fact, the only real expression of hope comes from a journalist who is reading a newspaper by the riverside. He remarks to Marat on the differences between Kazakhstan, with its brutal winters, and countries with warmer climates that have no need for warm clothes or oil for heat – but he also says that spring is beautiful, and it’s worth weathering brutal winters for. Of course, this journalist promptly gets shot to death in front of his toddler son, because he had written a scathing piece about some well-connected businessmen’s plans to privatise a factory.

In addition to being the most unsparing of Ómirbaev’s films, Killer is also the most direct. In Killer Dárejan Ómirbaev shows himself to be an expert at listening for what Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant called ‘intimations of deprival’. The brooding pathos of Marat, and the despair of his academic employer, ruthlessly reflects an insecurity that was felt by millions across the former Soviet states in the wake of shock therapy. And the prominent placement of Pepsi and Coca-Cola logos throughout the film shows us exactly whom Ómirbaev believes is to blame. It’s telling that the teenage daughter of the loan shark is seen exactly once, reciting English lessons from a Walkman: later, her father is shown telling her over the phone to study and get a degree overseas so she can stay in America – because why would she want to come back?

Yet despite the film’s squarely anti-capitalist stance, and despite Berik Qasımov’s yearnings for the stability of the Soviet welfare state and employment policies, Ómirbaev shows very little sympathy for Soviet nostalgia. The closest he comes, in fact, is a scene in Oleg’s bar where go-go dancers do a striptease with Soviet naval suits, accompanied by an English song with the refrain ‘These are good times!’ Even there, the nostalgia is framed in an ironic way, as though the only way to celebrate the ‘good times’ happening now is to remember when Soviet times might have been better. The imagery of the Soviet legacy is turned into an instrument for cheap titillation. Like everything else, nostalgia is a commodity for sale.

This brings me back to the faux-classical Chinese mudrost’ that sets the tone for the film. Despite its grimness, Killer bears less resemblance to other post-Soviet Kazakhstani gangster movies than it does to the spare, quiet desperation of the movies of Jia Zhangke, like 2000’s Platform and 2002’s Unknown Pleasures. Both directors are deeply sensitive to the losses – in terms of human dignity and moral direction – that have been incurred by their respective nations’ transitions to capitalism and sexual licence. Both directors hint that the freedom promised by the unleashing of market forces upon people’s personal and work lives is, in fact, another form of imprisonment.

Ómirbaev continues in the traditions of the Kazakh New Wave, here. All the actors are drama school students or amateurs. And Ómirbaev continues to make subtle hat-tips to Igla in particular. Of Ómirbaev’s films, I would have to say that even though Kardiogramma features more impressive art direction, and even though Stýdent makes a clearer and more subtle use of its literary footholds, I think Killer is so far my favourite of his. Here Ómirbaev’s minimalist tendencies are tastefully restrained, and he expresses himself with an admirable œconomy of language and visuals. The result is a film that is crisp, precise and riveting. It features an immediately relatable protagonist, whose descent into crime is shown with a subtlety such that, even though the audience is rightly appalled by Marat’s criminal action, and even though we are not surprised at his abrupt end, we can’t help but sympathise with his reasons.

What comes afterward? redux: post-liberalisms rising

Given the somewhat worried tone of my non-hagiographical blog posts of late (like ‘Hindsight and foresight’, ‘Ideological history’, ‘Solovyov and the problem of the post-sæcular’), I felt it might be wise to spend some time speaking a bit more dispassionately and analytically about what I’m observing at this point in world news.

I don’t think that the news on that end is all bad; not a bit of it. I am merely asserting that those of us in the West who are sceptical of the legacy of liberalism need to tread carefully because we are setting out onto uncharted territory. It is very difficult for any of us to reference or chart a future without the complex of liberalism-slash-nominalism-slash-capitalism-slash-technocracy hanging over us. We have – and I very much include myself here – a tendency to look to winged visions of prisca theologica and other past manifestations of præ-liberal order in our attempts to envision what a post-liberal order will look like. But what is happening on the global scale, as history keeps proving itself to be very far from a Fukuyama-style end, is both terrifying and exhilarating. Instead of one post- or alter-liberalism popping up to assert itself, we have a whole plethora of them, and some of them are very clearly preferable to the others.

What I’m going to try to do here is to organise them in a systemic way, such that they can be placed in perspective with each other. The ‘liberal international order’ centred in Washington and New York which finds itself still in power but with ever-dwindling reserves of moral or theoretical legitimacy, is also playing favourites. That needs to be very carefully borne in mind. That said, the global backlash against liberalism, the Washington Consensus, neoliberal technocracy and austerity politics has afforded us a moment of fertile experimentation in terms of political organisation. It’s worth taking account of where all these options are coming from, what is prompting their rise, and where they are likely to go.

1. Illiberal democratic socialism. This ‘option’ is the one I’ve been talking up for a long while now. It combines the œconomic priorities of democratic socialism (including public ownership, public infrastructure, state-mediated wage bargaining, strong welfare-state initiatives) with a strong Tory paternalist streak in social policy. Illiberal democratic socialists tend to be pro-natalist, pro-family, civic-communitarian, immigration-sceptical (but not racialist), classical in their architectural tastes. They also have a penchant for the preservation of wilderness and wildlife. Their star is currently ascendant in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Moldova and Slovakia), and has echoes in the ‘Russkiy Mir’ politics of the Baltic states.
   
   One of the reasons I’m so bullish on the illiberal democratic socialism of Eastern Europe is because it so easily bears the peculiar Byzantine marks of Yugoslav and Czechoslovak politics that I’ve come to value so deeply. As such, they bear a kin resemblance – not at all accidental, in my own humble opinion – to the Tory socialisms of John Ruskin and William Morris which were so influential on me. At the very least, this illiberal democratic socialism may be a means for Yugoslavs and Eastern Europeans to assert a strong regional identity.





2. Civilisational realism. This is the option that is being put forward primarily by the state and the leading theorists of Russia. As articulated by Dr Boris Mezhuev, civilisational realism is not so much an ideology as it is a strategy of engagement and an attempt to mitigate the effects of the modern de facto multipolar world order. The civilisational realists are noticeably informed by the conservatism of Karamzin, Il’in and Berdyaev, and very much opposed to manifestations of liberal ideology. But they are nonetheless quite mild and quiet on the topic of ideological issues of any sort, whether œconomic or social. The civilisational realists are not crusaders; they bear neither the Western nor the Islâmic world any animus unless either attacks them. Likewise, they aren’t particularly voluble on domestic issues, apart from critiquing the culture of corruption that has accompanied Russian society since the years of Gorbachev and Eltsin. As I have mentioned before, the intimation of loss is a strong constant undercurrent in the creative thinking of the Rodina. Civilisational realism is an expression of the Russian nation’s desire to be given an autonomy and dignity she (rightly) feels she’s been denied for decades.
   
   At the same time, though, the civilisational realists are keenly attuned to the questions of particularity and historical contingency that were originally raised by Herder. This is, without a doubt, a legacy of the Slavophil impress on Russian conservatism. Likewise, the willingness to engage the West on positive terms is a deliberate echo of the Slavophil engagements of the early-to-mid nineteenth century. But civilisational realism tends in a very different direction than Slavophilia. It doesn’t bear the messianic marks of the original Slavophils. Its historical awareness has given its proponents a degree of humility that is lacking in the likes of Kireevsky, Khomyakov or Aksakov. They do not pretend to be giving to the world the unique ‘new word’ that Russia was supposed to speak; instead, they are trying to allow Russia time to catch its breath again.





3. Marxism. Far from being the dead or moribund ideology that our élites have been telling us it’s been for the past three decades, the Marxist parties of southern India, Nepal, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Venezuela, (until recently) Bolivia and (yes) China have shown themselves to be resilient, flexible, tough and pragmatic. Whether or not you agree with their outcomes or the means by which they keep power, they have shown themselves to be politically stable in the face of active attempts to bludgeon them into submission or oblivion with sanctions, interventions and colour revolutions.
   
   More than that: Marxism has proven to be surprisingly dynamic. I can attest from experience that actually-existing Marxist parties operate in an intellectual space heavily-dosed with inaccessible, inane, soporific jargon. At the same time, there is valuable intellectual work being done at the fringes of the ‘big red circle’. Marxism is creatively making contact with environmentalism; with religion; even with culturally-conservative traditionalism – and the results are, to say the least, interesting to watch. Marxism is likely to remain a significant alternative to liberalism for the foreseeable future throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia.





4. Red Shî‘ism; Black Shî‘ism. The title of Dr Ali Shariati’s article is an apt description of the politics – on both sides of the coin – of the Mihwar al-Muqâwamah. It represents, like the civilisational realism described above, a strategy rather than an ideology per se, and it is a strategy that is shared by both sæcular Arab nationalists and theocratic Persians. But it is an offensive rather than a defensive strategy; a strategy for pursuing asymmetric warfare rather than a strategy for détente.
   
   ‘Red’ Shî‘ism, informed as it is by the martyrdoms of ‘Alî and Husayn on behalf of the helpless and by the eschatological ideal of righteous kingship inherited from Zoroastrianism, takes a natural and instinctive solidarity with the oppressed and uses it as a revolutionary rallying-cry. The ‘red’ Shî‘ism of Hizbullâh which actively takes up the cause of the Christians in Lebanon, just as readily in the case of Ansârullâh takes up the cause of the starving and deprived Yemeni people. The idea of martyrdom on behalf of the defenceless in Shî‘a Islâm is strong enough that its passion extends to the welfare of non-Muslims.
   
   But as Dr Shariati notes, ‘red’ Shî‘ism – the religion of the martyrs – turns rapidly into the ‘black’ Shî‘ism of the Safavids – the religion of mourning. There is a certain note of cynicism that creeps in around the edges when Shî‘ism is exposed to the realities of power. Though Shariati is more emphatic on the nature of ‘red’ Shî‘ism and more apophatic on ‘the religion of mourning’, what he doesn’t say about the latter is eloquent. The ‘religion of mourning’ is one in which the fervour for the dignity of the oppressed cools and congeals into a set of theocratic dictums. The cleric takes himself into a masjid beside ‘Âlî Qâpû, his face long with resignation, and expounds with grim necessity the realities of power politics. This is not, I hasten to add, merely an Islâmic problem: we Orthodox Christians, too, have our problems with ‘mourning’ cynicism. But the words of the clerics in Tehran, however just their outward cause, are to be watched with care.





5. Nationalisme intégral. I have written before, at length, about how Christian democratic politics betrayed their radical roots in the 1950s and 1960s for a rapprochement with the bourgeois politics of ordoliberalism and austerity œconomics. It seems to be something of an irony that when you strip away this discredited layer of œconomic whiggery, what remains is not the humane radicalism of Mounier and Maritain, which has long since absconded, but instead something a good deal bleaker: a positivist, corporatist nationalism recalling that of Maurras.
   
   The crisis of social solidarity that the European Union suffered with the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 spurred a massive backlash, particularly in Eastern and Southern Europe. The result in places like Poland (with the election of Duda) and Hungary (with the election of Orbán) was a certain coarsening of the national fibre. Both the PiS and the Fidesz parties lay claim to the Christian democratic mantle, but both of them avidly play to a certain narrative which links the salvation of Christendom to the fate of the nation-state, and furthermore posits the integral party apparatus as the sole means of saving both. This too-close and instrumentalist conceptual linkage between a higher and more primal form of solidarity, and a lower and more contingent one, is actually quite dangerous, and there are good reasons to be wary of it.
   
   Christians first and foremost should be wary of this kind of integral nationalism. It is not taking root only in Western nations culturally rooted in Christendom. It is also growing roots in India with the BJP under Modi, which self-describes as ‘integral humanist’. And it is also growing roots in Turkey with the AKP under Erdoğan, whose integralist ideology is drawn straight from Qutb’s articulation of political Sunnî Islâm – a connexion which the ‘Little Sultan’ still values in his current policy. The more integralist Hungaries and Polands are cultivated in the West, the more open and vulnerable we leave our brothers in the East to their enemies in places like Turkey and India.





6. Fascism. Speaking of far-right nationalisms, here’s another one that’s come slithering up from the gutter of the twentieth century’s mechanised total wars of ideology. Never mind, of course, that fascism is rooted in transhuman futurism and avant-garde æsthetics. Never mind that the resurgent alt-right shares similarly haute-moderne and post-moderne roots. It is still going to pretend to be the alternative to liberal decadence that Europe (and Latin America) has been missing. And, unfortunately, it looks likely to gain more than a mere handful of followers.
   
   I want to be very clear that I am using the term ‘fascism’ in a very narrow and technical sense. Fascism is not merely a byword for just any far-right nationalism with corporatist characteristics. It is not the same thing as the nationalisme intégral that I mention above, though it is a kissing-cousin. Intégrisme has problems, but it stops well short of claiming to regiment and militarise all aspects of social and individual life. Even in this strongly-restrictive definition, though, fascism is present enough in places like the Ukraine, Brazil and now Bolivia to be dangerous and worthy of mention as one of the illiberal ideological forces rising in liberalism’s shadow.





7. Salafi jihâdism. This fundamentalist ideology has been a distinctive danger around the globe since well before the World Trade Centre attacks on the eleventh of September, 2001 – arguably it’s been so since the late 1980s in Afghanistan. Now the fanatical toxin is spreading from Nigeria to Bosnia to Xinjiang and the Philippines. In Nigeria, Christians are being persecuted as never before. The headloppers of Dâ‘iš and al-Qâ‘idah are unfortunately a ubiquitous presence from Libya to Iraq, with Syria having borne a great brunt of the terrorist damage in recent years.
   
   The Salafis may receive aid from the United States intelligence services. However, they think of themselves as the ‘purifiers’ of Islâm from all the modern dross that has accumulated around centuries of Islâmic cultural practice throughout the world. That includes anything in the visual arts or in literature that does not conform to a rigid standard of Muslim piety. They adhere in lockstep to the most stringent and literal of textual interpretations of the Qur’ân and hadith, and increasingly they believe that the only right way to rectify Islâm is by the creation of a state purely founded on Islâmic law, which is to be rigidly and ruthlessly enforced uniformly across the entire body of believers and subject peoples. They are the Islâmic equivalent of the equally-literalist fundamentalist evangelicals in the United States.

Now, it should be crystal clear to the gentle readers of this blog that I harbour some robust partizan preferences among these options. I am avowedly a very strong supporter of the syncretic paternalistic leftism that has arisen in Eastern Europe: the closest thing on offer we have to the High Toryism of Britain’s better days. I also have strong sympathies toward the ‘civilisational realism’ of Russia’s conservatives. I have long felt such realism to be a healthy counterweight to the foreign policy we conduct here, based as it is on outdated ideologies on autopilot and a morass of private interests anchored in the military-industrial complex.

I have also been known, on occasion, to comment positively on political Shî‘ism and on Chinese Marxism. However, my true loyalties lie with Mosaddegh and the National Front in Iran’s case; and with the Democratic League in China’s case – both socialist-leaning organisations with healthy respect for tradition.

So it should come as no surprise as I finish this analysis, that I am deeply invested in what form the post-liberal order in the world will take. I do not want to live in a world dominated by the picayune hatreds and petty spats of a gross-odd bickering nation-states, each headed by the most clownish of bourgeois buffoons their pandering mass-medias can conjure to the baying rabble. It is an insult to lions to have to be governed by such rats. Neither do I want to be governed by a dour, joyless puritanical religious élite who would snatch the Christmas eggnog out of my hands and expect to be thanked for the favour. At the same time, it’s clear to me that actually-existing liberalism, exhausted as it is in a moral and intellectual sense, can no longer pretend to offer to the world a set of coherent rules for the pursuit of the good. That task now falls to others. But which others: that is a question that matters deeply.

It strikes me that all of these options have a certain investment in questions of theopolitics. That is not a surprise. The Enlightenment project was by and large a separation of the political sphere from the questions of ultimate meaning, and the relegation of those questions of meaning to the purely private sphere and the realm of the conscience. It is therefore no surprise that the ideologies now jockeying to take the place of liberalism are attempting to reconnect questions of governance to questions of meaning in various ways. Once again I have to reiterate: I agree with the religious intégristes on the stakes involved here. I also agree with them on two of their three sentences. But there are clearly a number of different ways in which the temporal and the æternal ends of man can be configured, and we would do well not to choose one which seems too easy or too glib.

Prayers for Prešov

Last Friday a gas explosion ripped through an apartment complex on Mukačevská ulica in the eastern Slovak town of Prešov. Ninety professional and twenty-nine volunteer firefighters were despatched to fight the conflagration, which was successfully extinguished only on Saturday evening. Eight people have died so far; dozens more have lost their homes. It’s one of the worst tragœdies of this sort to afflict Prešov. President Zuzana Čaputová has offered her condolences; Mayor of Prešov Andrea Turčanová has organised a volunteer fund for the victims; and Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini has visited the city and allocated €1,000,000 in government funds for repairs, reconstruction and aid.

Prešov is the largest city of Eastern Slovakia and also the capital of its eponymous region. The Orthodox Christians of Slovakia – overwhelmingly belonging to the Carpatho-Rusin minority – mostly belong to this region. It is home to the former ecclesiastical capital of the Eparchy of Mukačevo and Užhorod (formerly the Eparchy of Mukačevo and Prešov under the Serbian Church), the Cathedral of Saint Aleksandr Nevsky, and it has been important to Orthodoxy since the days of Saints Cyril and Methodius.

If possible, gentle readers, please do contribute something to Ms Turčanová’s emergency fund to aid those who were bereaved or made temporarily homeless by the blast. It should be possible to use the Xoom or Venmo services to donate. The fund account belongs to ČSOB Banka, and the account number is SK90 7500 0000 0040 0859 1229, variable number 6122019. The fund is in the name of the city: Mesto Prešov. And, of course, please keep the people of Prešov, particularly those who are dead or grieving or homeless, in your prayers.