Saint Cyril of Jerusalem and the poverty of philosophy

St Cyril of Jerusalem

Today, the seventh of May, is one of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem’s two feast days in the Orthodox Church—the other one, the commemoration of his repose, being on the eighteenth of March. This is the day on which the miraculous appearance of the Cross in the skies over Golgotha and the Mount of Olives occurred in the year 351, and Saint Cyril’s is commemorated for his role in witnessing this event.

Not much is known of Saint Cyril’s early life. He was born in 315 and became a priest at the age of 31, in 346, and was elevated to the archbishopric four years later. His archbishopric was marked by a decades-long string of exiles, imprisonments and persecutions: under Emperor Constantius, under Emperor Julian the Apostate, and under Emperor Valens. Yet Saint Cyril somehow managed, in the midst of it all, to retain his humanity and trust in God—over against the princes and sons of men who seemingly always and everywhere opposed him. Saint Cyril spent all of his own wealth providing for the citizens of Jerusalem during a famine, and even pawned off Church utensils in order to buy grain for those who were starving. At another time, Saint Cyril was said to have prophesied that Julian the Apostate’s attempts to rebuild the Jewish Temple would come to naught—and later a series of disasters struck the Temple such that construction couldn’t continue.

If his hagiography is to be believed, then, like the Scriptural God he glorifies, Saint Cyril was emphatically not a fan of sedentary architecture.

Yet Saint Cyril is important, not for his miracles or for his prophecies or even for his works of charity, but instead for the writings and the teachings that he left. I have recently returned to reading his Catechetical Lectures. It is stunning how much I garnered, going back for a reread.

In my own anti-philosophical mood, reinforced by the occurrences in Gaza and a certain well-known continental philosopher’s morally-indefensible stands on this and other current events, I find myself in particular drawn to Saint Cyril’s prophetic invective against the Hellenic philosophers of his own time:

There is need of a wakeful soul, since there are many that make spoil through philosophy and vain deceit. The Greeks on the one hand draw men away by their smooth tongue, for honey droppeth from a harlot’s lips: whereas they of the Circumcision deceive those who come to them by means of the Divine Scriptures, which they miserably misinterpret though studying them from childhood to old age, and growing old in ignorance. (Lecture IV)

In his lecture against heresy, Saint Cyril correctly upbraids the philosophers in the point of his jeremiad against Manichaeism for ‘not… reproving the king in the cause of truth’ and ‘not… destroying the idols’. The promise of Plato’s Socrates, and the promise of Aristotle, that men might be made their own masters through the search for truth along the path of reason—is a deception. Philosophy is a path, not to self-mastery, but to self-idolatry.

If the entire Strauss-Kojève debate shows us anything useful, it is that Saint Cyril is right on the money at that point. The entire Western philosophical project in fact enslaves the human being to a mode of language and its use, that will always and everywhere serve the purposes of would-be Pharaohs, Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons and Hitlers. Philosophy cannot speak truth to power, but will ultimately always be the slave of power¹. The only way to win the philosophers’ semantic shell game is not to play. Why is this? It’s because Socrates’s entire aim, to start with, is flawed. In his fallen state, man is not his own master, and cannot be.

So then, where can we turn?

The Palestinian Patriarch’s point of reference, as for Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Ephraim the Syrian, is always Scripture. Though we are not made aware in his hagiography of his parentage, Saint Cyril reads Scripture the way a Syriac or a Palestinian—that is to say, as a Semite—does. Saint Cyril speaks as a pedagogue, not as a debater or a polemicist, of Scripture.

The catechumens to whom Saint Cyril delivered these addresses during Great Lent, would have heard Scripture, read aloud to them, in the context of the Divine Liturgy before they would have been called upon to depart. These writings that Saint Cyril has left to us, likewise, were first delivered as lectures to the catechumens. Saint Cyril’s method is as important as the message: he appeals to what is written, and attempts thereupon to interpret all of the catechumens’ questions about the Symbol of Faith.

For Saint Cyril, the rational intellect is something that must be yoked, and brought under the discipline of the text. This is in order to bring the catechumens’ behaviour into accord with Scriptural statutes, and the will of the Scriptural God:

Seek not the things that are too deep for thee, neither search out the things that are above thy strength: what is commanded thee, think thereupon. (Lecture VI)

To give one example, when discussing the Mystery of Baptism, does he go into abstruse theologising over the symbolism of the waters? Not in the least. He says instead:

What then must you do? And what are the fruits of repentance? Let him that hath two coats give to him that hath none… and he that hath meat, let him do likewise. Wouldst thou enjoy the grace of the Holy Spirit, yet judgest the poor not worthy of bodily food? (Lecture III)

Baptism entails upon itself a change, not only in mind, not only in ideas, but in comportment. And the measuring-stick is not any creed, not any mental formula: it is concrete love of neighbour… and that, as understood in the context of the Law of Moses, the Books and the Prophets.

Once more, in discoursing upon God the Father, and the relationship between the Father and the Son, Saint Cyril pointedly does not come to any philosophical conclusion regarding the oneness or the many-ness of the substance or the nature or the will of God the Father:

I have ever wondered at the curiosity of the bold men, who by their imagined reverence fall into impiety. For though they know nothing of Thrones, and Dominions, and Principalities, and Powers, the workmanship of Christ, they attempt to scrutinise their Creator Himself. Tell me first, O most daring man, wherein does Throne differ from Dominion, and then scrutinise what pertains to Christ… Not even the Holy Ghost Himself has spoken in the Scriptures concerning the generation of the Son from the Father. Why then dost thou busy thyself about things which not even the Holy Ghost has written in the Scriptures? Thou that knowest not the things which are written, busiest thou thyself about the things which are not written? (Lecture XI)

Instead, he comes to the conclusion that

the first virtue of godliness in Christians is to honour their parents, to requite the troubles of those who begat them, and with all their might to confer on them what tends to their comfort… (Lecture VII)

What is important to St Cyril is not to dispute over the underlying attributes or inner relations of the Persons (let alone about even whether or not they are ‘persons’, in the language of Greek philosophy!), but instead what is implied from the Scriptural Godhead in how we should behave, from the love of the Father for His Son. In other words, St Cyril places himself and his catechumenate under the didactic hand of Scripture. He does not try to philosophise it; nor does he try to read it as history or as science. His concern is chiefly the manner in which we behave, and finds that Scripture will judge us on not on how we think, but on what we do:

We do nothing without the body. We blaspheme with the mouth, and with the mouth we pray. With the body we commit fornication, and with the body we keep chastity. With the hand we rob, and by the hand we bestow alms; and the rest in like manner. Since then the body has been our minister in all things, it shall also share with us in the future the fruits of the past. (Lecture XVIII)

This saintly Patriarch, the direct apostolic predecessor to the current Patriarch Theophilos III, speaks as much to Christians now, not to sit aside idly and watch as the Holy Land burns once again. Instead, we are to follow the statutes and commandments of the One Scriptural God, and to love our neighbours, today: not just in the idle chatter of the philosophers, but in truth.

What is commanded thee: think thereupon. Amen.

^{1. That’s how someone like Žižek can pretend, and perhaps even delude himself, that he’s doing something liberating… when in fact he’s actively and consciously demonising the Arabs at the same time as they’re being slaughtered en masse by the Israelis, and cravenly serving his NATO paymasters’ interests at the same time.↩}

The meaning belongs to the text(ile)

From the Bruce Museum of Greenwich, Connecticut. It is, of course, a white Anglo-Saxon academic’s commentary on Diné weaving, and should be taken as such. But the section called ‘Weaving from a Navajo perspective’ is not without a certain mashal-ic merit:

There is more to a rug than a tight weave or aniline or vegetal dye. An entire culture might be woven into a single textile, but to the non-Navajo, the rug is silent. We search for meaning. Anglo collectors and tourists like Native American art with "symbolism" and hidden meaning - figurative art that "tells a story" rather than geometric patterns. Even in geometric forms, many will search for deep significance in every triangle or zigzag, suggesting that stepped triangles and stripes represent striations in the mesas and the desert sunset. These results are more romantic than realistic. Streaks may come from faulty dyeing; the step motif results from the nature of the vertical loom.

Outsiders also over emphasize external influences - the Pueblo, Spanish, and Anglo contributions of materials, techniques, and designs, and the role of traders and collectors - rather than the weavers themselves...

Weaving is a sacred art, embodying creation stories, prayers and ceremonial practices, the ancient and historical past. In weaving, the individual preserves hozho, the concept that combines order, beauty, balance and harmony.

A recent study asked fifty Navajo elders to examine a collection of 200 traditional textiles at a museum and identify symbols and meaningful techniques in each. One elder interpreted the design of an M-like figure to be Spider Woman in the Creation story. Barely visible particles - bits of feathers and plant matter - woven into rugs were thought to relate to stories or ceremonies. Another weaver saw a diagonal cross as signifying the Long Walk, and the double diamond as specifying the imprisonment at Bosque Redondo. A slight variation in color along one edge of a rug was said to be the weaver's attempt to avoid perfect symmetry.

This study is controversial because there is no way to tell whether a color change is intentional or a dye result, or whether a foreign item has simply been picked up in the wool. Only the actual weaver can explain the piece. Most Navajo will not explain another weaver's rug because it is too personal and individual; the meaning belongs to the textile.

The Diné are, of course, nomadic pastoralists, indigenous to the American Southwest. They still herd sheep, whose wool makes these rugs that are woven. Of course they know better than to try to explain or interpret another weaver’s rug. That would be both arrogant, and ignorant.

Now bear in mind that the Latin word textile comes from the same root verb, texō (‘I weave’), as the noun textus.

Let the reader understand.

Six Walks in a disappearing wilderness

Cross-posted from Silk and Chai:

I just finished reading Palestinian Walks—a poignant and tragic memoir by human rights lawyer, author and Palestinian activist Raja Shehadeh about his work in the Holy Land over the course of nearly four decades. Shehadeh, who is an ethnic Palestinian Christian, makes numerous Scriptural references owing to the simple fact that he lives where Scripture was written, and where the events of Scripture took place. But his spirituality is not of an overt, apologist or confessional nature; indeed, his attitude toward organised religion in general is self-avowedly ‘cynical’. Living in a land which is riven by communal factionalism and self-serving zealotry on the part of the settlers, does understandably tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth when it comes to theological questions. But rather, we can see that spirituality most clearly in his meditations on the shifting ecological balance and the fragile disappearing landscapes he loves so dearly. He is very much so a lover of the land and its people, a fact which comes through painfully in every chapter. Glimmers and moments of his faith in Christianity do emerge, however—particularly in his visit to the Monastery of St George Choziba in Wadi Qelt.

To get a good grasp of the tenor of the book, it’s necessary to quote Shehadeh at length about the nature of these walks he would take. Here is his description of the sarḥa (سرحة), which is the term he uses for the sort of walk he would do:

It was mainly young men who went on these expeditions. They would take a few provisions and go to the open hills, disappear for the whole day, sometimes for weeks and months. They often didn't have a particular destination. To go on a sarha was to roam freely, at will, without restraint. The verb form of the word means to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning, leaving them to wander and graze at liberty. The commonly used noun sarha is a colloquial corruption of the classical word. A man going on a sarha wonders aimlessly, not restricted by time and place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself. But not any excursion would qualify as a sarha. Going on a sarha implies letting go.

Shehadeh’s evocation of the sarḥa rather mirrors the false etymology that Henry David Thoreau posits for ‘saunter’ (from ‘sainte-terre’) as a sort of pilgrimage, though one without a fixed aim. I have little doubt that this choice was intentional on Shehadeh’s part, even if it’s left unsaid. Shehadeh demonstrates a firm command of English-language literature regarding his home country, and an enviable degree of appreciation for its artistry—even as he chides figures like WM Thackeray, Herman Melville and Mark Twain for their unappreciative, imperialist’s-eye view of his country and his people.

Shehadeh describes a landscape in which every ridge, crest, rock, dry riverbed and hill-slope has a name—in Arabic, most commonly, but with the occasional Canaanite and Aramaic epithet arising. He describes an austerely exquisite panorama, not to everyone’s tastes, but with life and vibrancy enough to one trained in the ability to look for it. His careful—yet lively—descriptions of the geological features, of the local plant and animal life, and the ways in which his fellow Palestinians (and their goats, their grapevines and their earthen houses) came to a modus vivendi with their near-desert surroundings, all bear witness to the personal stake he has in the well-being of this place.

Yet despite this naturalist, travelogue feel, Palestinian Walks is very much so a memoir, a personal text. He describes the effort his maternal uncle, Abu Ameen, put into constructing a qasr, essentially a cottage, in the wilderness of Harrasha—and the quirky romance he enjoyed with his hardworking bride, Zariefeh, as they spent their honeymoon hauling rocks and setting them into place. We get to see some of the family dynamics, too. Raja Shehadeh belongs to that educated class of Palestinians, who were drawn into the British administration at Jaffa… although they all hailed from Ramallah. He describes the differences in attitude between his two uncles: one who went off to Jaffa to become a ‘successful’ administrator; and the other who stayed behind and lived stubbornly in the desert hills outside of Ramallah, neither knowing or needing any other kind of life.

A personal streak runs throughout each of these sarḥât. Raja describes one of the first land cases that he took up on receiving his law degree, defending the title of a certain Palestinian named François Albina (who was referred to as ‘the Christian’ landowner by his Muslim neighbours in Beit ‘Ur, in contradistinction to another large landowner nearby whom his neighbours called ‘the Jew’). He details much of the history behind this case, including how the Israeli settlers—with the entire machinery of the Israeli legal system and seemingly bottomless foreign pockets behind them—resorted to practically every trick of legal chicanery and sleight-of-hand in order to undercut Albina’s claim to the land… and even essentially blackmail him into abandoning that same claim by demanding compensation for its use. Raja also describes how this served as an almost perfect test case: the defendant was an independent landowner who was not a Muslim. Yet the Israeli judiciary, despite being forced at every turn by Raja’s argument to acknowledge that Albina had an incontestable and continuous presence on and claim to his own land, ultimately decided on an expansive interpretation of an Israeli military order that gave the go-ahead for settlers to take it and build on it anyway.

Raja’s description of the wall that went up, straight through Albina’s property, is heart-wrenching. Instead of a gentle hillside shaded by pine trees, there was a garish, sixteen-foot concrete wall separating a nestle of villas in a gated community for Israeli high-tech IT employees, with a highway running to the coast, all lit by electric floodlights, overshadowing what remained of the Palestinian community in Beit ‘Ur. He describes both the intrusion of the built space, and all of the architectural choices which accompanied it, as perfectly keyed to stir up animosity and hatred between the two sides, assuring that violence would become an issue later. This point is driven home as, later, in the same vicinity, Raja and his wife Penny end up being shot at by Palestinian militants (Raja doesn’t say Ḥamâs specifically) even after calling to them in Arabic to stop.

Raja Shehadeh makes no bones about the fact that he refuses to consider violence as a legitimate tool. His weapon of choice is the law. His reasons for this are not religious at all, but primarily secular and practical: he knows full well that the Palestinians will not be able to outgun or outkill the Israelis; and he also understands that no peace arrived at through bloodshed is capable of being permanent. He also takes a long-term, generational view of the conflict… though to what extent this view is the product of hindsight in view of the Oslo Accords (which undermined practically all of his legal work defending Palestinian land claims) is unclear.

The Oslo Accords loom large in Shehadeh’s narrative as a kind of classical nemesis. In his view, the Palestinians who came to Oslo were essentially lulled into a false sense of security by the theatrics of hospitality put on by their Norwegian hosts, while the Israelis essentially walked away with the legal rights to the proverbial lock, stock and barrel. Although Shehadeh clearly, and for very good personal reasons, shuns and deplores the violence of the militants, still he views the political opportunism and low cunning of Fataḥ and the PLO more generally in still-bleaker terms: having sold out the patrimony of their people in exchange for aid money and pats on the head from Western governments. (In this, he echoes a sentiment I’ve heard repeatedly in Antiochian and Palestinian Christian circles, particularly with regard to Mahmoud Abbas.) One sees a lot of this frustration in his third sarḥa down to the Dead Sea, which he takes in the company of a young PLO member who talks about the Oslo Accords with a nigh-intolerable rose-tinted naïveté. Here he also describes with alarm the disappearing biome and impending ecological catastrophe which can be observed in the lowering line of the Dead Sea, as Israeli interests divert the fresh water of the Jordan.

In another rare flash of religiosity, Raja Shehadeh describes his pilgrimage to the Monastery of Saint George Choziba in the chapter which follows. He is more comfortable, it seems, referring to figures of the Old Testament (like King David and the Prophet Isaiah) than to the figures of the New—but given where he lives and what his context is, perhaps this is not so strange. Again: his attitude toward religion in general is a negative one. Given what he has described of the overt religiosity of the Israeli settlers, which somehow coexists with callous disregard for neighbour, with casual violence and with absolute comfort in the one-sided and prejudicial use of the machinery of law… this is understandable. And yet he approaches the monastery, sixteen centuries old, with its fortified walls, its dark incensed cloistered interior, its candle-lit icons, with an attitude of deep respect and admiration, if only in the sense of inspiration for the ordering of one’s own life, or the attitude which a people under siege need to adopt.

Raja Shehadeh’s cloister of choice was a modest home with a courtyard in Ramallah… though even this was not inviolate of Israeli brutality, as he learned the hard way when his town came under siege and later occupation. More to the point, perhaps, is that writing became the discipline through which he could manage the defeats, the insults, the violence and the hopelessness which had become the common lot of his people. He discusses, in the context of a sarḥa which the two of them took together, the long friendship he has with Dr Mustafa Barghouti of the PNI Party, and the differences which their lives took. Raja Shehadeh began as a lawyer and ended up as a writer; Mustafa Barghouti began as a medical doctor and ended up as a politician. Yet the two men share a conviction that the Palestinian struggle must be waged in civil society and in terms of generations rather than intifadas.

The final chapter is a harrowing one, but it’s one which I think Shehadeh relates masterfully, simply from a literary standpoint. He describes getting lost right around Dolev, where he grew up—not because of his failing memory, but because the landscape itself had changed so much as to be unrecognisable to him. He ends up finding his way back to Ramallah by process of elimination: all the places which are blocked off to him by Israeli settlements, border walls or checkpoints. He describes a tense encounter with a young, armed Israeli settler who has snuck out of Dolev in order to smoke hashish. The conversation between the two is narrated excellently: a confrontation between two views of the same place that have been shaped by different values and different realms of knowledge. Placing this conversation at the end of the book, after we have been given this personal history of legal struggle and attempts to conserve some semblance of legal consideration for both the landscape and its original inhabitants, was a shrewd choice on Shehadeh’s part: we can see the clear delineation between his view and the ‘settler’ view. Shehadeh is a conservationist and a believer in the rule of law; the settler he encounters is a believer in material progress and victors’ justice. Yet in the end the two of them come, if not to an understanding, then at least to an uneasy truce over the nargileh (punctuated poignantly by the sounds of distant gunfire—whose ‘side’ it is, neither can tell).

Palestinian Walks is a book that I would strongly recommend as a means of understanding the (both literal, figurative and historical) lay of the land in the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as the common experience that shapes the convictions of the Palestinian side of that conflict. The author—a nominal Christian and a functional pacifist—is nonetheless an authoritative voice for a people who are predominantly Muslim and who are committed to a resistance which can turn, as we have seen, violent. It’s also valuable as an English-language travelogue. However he might chide and wag his finger at the likes of Melville and Thackeray and Twain, what Shehadeh has given us could easily be placed alongside them as a companion-piece, painting in intimate colours the intricate but endangered desert ecology and human communities of the West Bank.

One last note. My own view is that it’s a grim necessity, in these days, to engage in such intentional book-reading as a counterpoint to the prevailing media narratives over the recent conflict. You are not going to get the truth about this or any conflict abroad from CNN, from Fox News, from the New York Times or from the Wall Street Journal, which are all mouthpieces for the State Department and committed to a singular liberal ideology and historical myopia which colours their entire editorial perspective. The benefit of reading books like Shehadeh’s, is that such reading can help someone who is distant and removed from the conflict gain a sense of context, a sense of historical grounding, which is not otherwise available in our information landscape. Although Shehadeh is somewhat self-deprecating about his chosen means of coping with political defeat and the disaster befalling his people, his writing does serve this very needful and, dare I say, God-pleasing purpose.

Raja Shehadeh

The synodal religious type: two perspectives

There is also a path that seeks a genuinely religious relation to people, that does not want either a humanistic simplification of human relations or an ascetic disdain of them...

We are called to oppose the mystery of authentic human communion to all false relations among people. This is the only path on which Christ’s love can live; moreover, this is the only path of life--outside it is death. Death in the fire and ashes of various hatreds that corrode modern mankind, class, national, and race hatreds, the godless and giftless death of cool, uncreative, imitative, essentially secular democracy.

- St Maria (Skobtsova), ‘The Second Gospel Commandment’

There is much that alarms me on this side of the front [the West]. I look everywhere and nowhere do I find anything that would point to the possibility of any breakthrough from material life to eternity. Occasionally we come across a very uncertain expression of extremely general and diffused idealistic hopes, somewhat in the style of Dostoevsky’s ‘sympathy with everything beautiful and lofty’--but it is all rather vague. They say: ‘We’re defending the right cause, we’re fighting for the liberation of national minorities, or for the federal organisation of Europe, or for democracy.’

These things are not enough. Test yourselves.

Imagine that you must immediately give your life for one of these goals of struggle. Try to imagine a real death. And you will understand that your own life, however modestly you may evaluate its significance, is in some ultimate metaphysical sense greater than any [of these things]...

- St Maria (Skobtsova), ‘Insight in Wartime’

Rereading Saint Maria (Skobtsova) of Paris’s Essential Writings, I find there is much to discomfort and disturb readers of every political persuasion; not least the persuasion which currently considers itself ‘left-liberal’. Saint Maria’s attitude toward secular humanism and toward political democracy, and toward that constellation of values which currently carries the banner of the European Union, is decidedly negative, even harsh. Again and again throughout her writings she considers bourgeois democracy and its cultural trappings to be nothing but pale, unsatisfactory facsimiles of what Christian love should look like in the public sphere. This places her squarely at odds with contemporary authors like Aristotle Papanikolaou, and affiliated outlets like Public Orthodoxy.

Her strivings toward a theopolitical ‘synthesis’, for which the touchstones to which she keeps returning for them remain Vladimir Solovyov, Aleksei Khomyakov and Fyodor Dostoevsky, were never about reconciling Orthodox Christianity to any purely secular ideal of political life, even as these strivings retained, as they did to the very end of her life, some of their earlier socialist, pro-labour character!

Would she have embraced Putin, as Solzhenitsyn did? It is difficult to tell, and in any event, given all that has happened since the Second World War, it is an unfair question to ask. But on the other hand, given what she wrote during that time, it is supremely difficult to imagine that Saint Maria would take the same path of acquiescence to the spirit of the age, that too many Orthodox Christians in Western Europe and America have done. Even more so when one considers that toward the end of her life, Saint Maria of Paris evinced greater and greater pity and sympathy upon her own people, who were bearing the brunt of the Nazi attack. According to her friend and close collaborator Nikolai Berdyaev: ‘she had a passionate love’--even an ‘exceptional love’--‘for Russia and for the Russian people; in the final period of her life, the period of the War, she assumed a tone of passionate patriotism which took on an extreme form’. That patriotism, and the tenor thereof, may be seen in quotes such as this one:

It is hard for us Russians. Perhaps never before has history created such tangled and contradictory situations as we now find ourselves in. We may say that, whatever turn things took, under whatever circumstances, we always got hit on the head in passing.

- St Maria (Skobtsova), ‘Insight in Wartime’

It is hard to see such sympathy as ‘extreme’, as Berdyaev does; if there is an extremity to it, it is an extremity of empathy, with which there can be little objection. But it is this Russian patriotism, a patriotism of sympathy-in-suffering, which colours Saint Maria’s treatment of the other ‘types’ of spirituality she identifies, first in her essay ‘A Justification of Pharisaism’ and secondly in her essay ‘Types of Religious Life’. Saint Maria takes the view, an understandable view in the wake of the October Revolution, that the typical religious stance of the white émigré, with its emphasis on a dead autocracy and a reliance on modes of spirituality that were better-suited to a bureaucratic state or noble circles which no longer existed in any meaningful form, was ultimately doomed:

There is no doubt but that on the historical plane the synodal period has come to an end with no possibility of return; there is no basis for assuming that the psychology which it engendered can survive it for long. In this sense it is not important how we assess such a religious type. Only one thing is important: without a doubt it is dying and has no future. The future challenges the Church with complex, new and crucial problems.

- St Maria (Skobtsova), ‘Types of Religious Life’

But despite this harsh, Ezri-like assessment of the synodal religious type, Saint Maria is by no means lacking in sympathy toward it. It comes on the tail end of her having praised, albeit in highly qualified terms, the ordered life which it protected, the traditions which it governed, and the wondrous art and architecture which it inspired. And in her earlier essay, ‘A Justification of Pharisaism’, although she distinctly blames the failures of the synodal type of religiosity with the ‘falling-away’ of the intelligentsia and the forces of revolution that were unleashed on the country, she also says that it is not for the philistine, the one without religious or moral feeling, to attack the synodalists who preserved the treasures of Christianity through times of great suffering and deprivation. And she concludes, poignantly: ‘Yet the Church of that period also had her righteous men.’

It was in light of going back to read Saint Maria’s Essential Writings that I picked up Fr John (Strickland)’s book on The Making of Holy Russia. Saint Maria proclaims the doom of this particular type of religious life, and pronounces it exhausted of its creative forces; what Fr John does, is he goes back and examines those creative forces themselves, which were evident in the propagators of the synodal religious type, the champions of autocracy and Russian Orthodox patriotism in the times before the October Revolution. Fr John ultimately holds up the same two sides of the coin that Saint Maria does: both the sympathy for it and the evidence of its failures. But in Fr John’s treatment of the synodal type of religious life, we get to observe those forces in greater detail, in greater historical specificity, than we do in Saint Maria’s rather more typological, artistic (in the sense of painting a portrait rather than taking a photograph) overview of the same. In Fr John’s book we get to see specific figures, thinkers and speakers emerge, on both the reformist and on the conservative side of that religious type.

Fr John speaks of Orthodox patriotism in Russia in two distinct phases. The first, largely corresponding to the rule of Tsar Aleksandr III and the early portion of the rule of Tsar St Nikolai II, is one in which the full creative energies of Orthodox patriotism are bent on both the ‘internal mission’ of the Church (to Russia’s lukewarm-to-apostate intellectual and noble classes) and on the ‘external mission’ (somewhat misleadingly so called, as it pertains to missionary activities among the Russian Empire’s non-Russian ethnic minorities). The task of crafting a theology of love of homeland, and love of the people therein, in fact required a great deal of creative energy and endeavour; especially given that Russia’s Slavophil inheritance rendered most clergymen of the time especially sceptical of the Western-style nation-state and the revolutionary secular mass-political ideology that accompanied it.

And so you see in The Making of Holy Russia a large number of different and disparate voices adding to this conversation, ranging from staid reactionary critics of progress such as Archbishop Nikanor (Brovkovich) of Odessa and Archpriest John (Vostorgov), to socialists such as Archpriest Dr Pavel (Svetlov). This is in a time, under Tsar Aleksandr III when there was already articulated an ideological doctrine of Official Nationality, the questions of how the Church with its universal mission and imperatives could be reconciled with duties to the state and (the growing sense) to the people, began being explored with an acute intensity of interest. However, there was a strong sense during this period that State and Church were indeed in harmony, and that the Tsar could be trusted to be an Apostolic statesman in the mould of St Constantine or St Vladimir.

There was something of a crisis among these adherents to Russian Orthodox patriotism when Tsar Nikolai II began calling for a degree of religious freedom and official sanction to followers of other faiths in the Empire, beginning in 1902. He issued several edicts which seemed to hint at a desire for greater religious toleration in the Russian Empire, which rather disturbed Orthodox patriots such as Archpriest John (Vostorgov). In 1905, after the events of 22 January, Tsar Nikolai II made good on these promises with his Paschal Edict making religious toleration a policy which held throughout the Empire. This precipitated something of a crisis of conscience among Russian Orthodox patriots, who were suddenly in the uncomfortable position of attempting to uphold an autocracy which was no longer keeping up its ‘end of the bargain’ to support the Church. One bone of particular contention in this matter regarded the Old Believers, who (as Fr John notes) had in many ways a more convincing claim to represent the ‘national faith’ of the Russian people than the synodal Church did.

This led to Orthodox churchmen taking several different paths. One path was into the arms of the ‘patriotic unions’, or Black Hundreds. This was very much a minority option, as most of the Orthodox clergy regarded these unions as revolutionary in temperament, and ‘pagan’ in their understanding of nationality. (It is worthy of note that the term ‘pagan’ in Russian, языческий connotes a connection to language as a marker of ethnic belonging.) Additionally, Orthodox clerics who were involved in the ‘external mission’ openly abhorred the Black Hundreds’ hostility to the inorodtsy as an impediment precisely to that mission. Among the Orthodox figures who did approach the Black Hundreds, none of them did so uncritically. Here Fr John highlights the examples of Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii), whose objections to the worst forms of nationalism are a matter of public record, Archpriest John (Vostorgov) and lay Orthodox publicist Vladimir Skvortsov. Even though the latter two figures did occasionally lapse into ethno-nationalism of the type represented by the ‘patriotic unions’, on the whole these three attempted to soften and convert the pagan ethno-nationalist revolutionism of the Black Hundreds into something more recognisably Christian.

Another approach was taken by Orthodox intellectuals and philosophers, of whom Fr John highlights Vladimir Solovyov, Fr Sergei (Bulgakov) and the artist Mikhail Nesterov. These three figures, as a general tendency, attempted to articulate and promote a form of Russian Orthodox patriotism that was civic and plurinational rather than ethnic, embracing suffering rather than embracing revolutionism, and approaching social and economic problems with a greater urgency of need than approaching military ones. Both the religious idealism of Solovyov, which was later embraced and tempered by Fr Sergei, and the artistic hallowing of the Russian wilderness and the ‘feminine’ genius of the national Russian saints which was exposited by Nesterov, provided an alternative understanding of Russian Orthodox patriotism. This is the more radical understanding which was picked up by Saint Maria of Paris in her later years; Saint Maria was a close friend of Fr Sergei (Bulgakov), and drew explicitly on the thought of Vladimir Solovyov in her intellectual life.

Fr John bookends his discussion of Russian Orthodox patriotism of the ‘synodal’ type with two public Orthodox commemorations: that of the glorification of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, and that of the glorification of Patriarch St Ermogen of Moscow. In his comparison and contrast of these two commemorations, the first one being much more public and commented-upon than the latter, with the latter courting some controversy as a result of the fractured state of Orthodox patriotism at the time. (For example, the Old Believers, using their newfound freedom of the press, put forward a case that St Ermogen was in fact the last true representative of the Old Belief before the Petrine and Nikonian reforms distorted the witness of the official Church.) At the same time, though, Fr John notes that despite the failures (again in agreement with St Maria) of the synodalists to articulate a coherent vision of their understanding of the links between the universal Church and the Russian people, there was significant creative energy that went into the endeavour.

This is a necessary step, I think, to understanding the situation that Russia finds itself in now. Again, they find themselves in a tangled and contradictory circumstance in which their heads are getting hit in passing. They find themselves the target of superpower posturing and encroachment, they find their brethren in Donbass, Crimea, Kherson and Zaporozh’e under threat, they find themselves backed into an intolerable situation. And the Russian Orthodox Church, under Patriarch Kirill, now finds itself once again having to walk a tightrope between being a national Church with deep ties to the Russian state, and an international / post-Imperial Church with flocks of many different ethnic groups in numerous countries in the former Soviet lands. This is a situation which calls for understanding and informed criticism rather than the mere blind opprobrium and self-satisfied sententious sermonising in which Western Christians (including Orthodox Christians living in the West) are now wont to indulge.

Encouragement to new believers in other lands

Father Artemy Vladimirov, a popular Moscow-area priest, gave several interviews, epistles and other writings over the course of about twenty years while he was rector at All Saints’ Church in Moscow, which have a particular importance to an American audience. These were very kindly translated, compiled and edited by Sister Nectaria (McLees) and published by the Road to Emmaus journal as a single volume in 2010: Bright Faith.

One of the major draws of Bright Faith, at least for me, is the fact that Fr Artemy has a warm and understanding sense of humour. (Speaking of humour, Fr Artemy advises us to look at the motivation. He has little use for cynical or belittling humour, the sorts of laughter that cut others down, but he speaks very highly of self-deprecation and situational humour.) He clearly ministers to people who come from outside of Russia, and embraces them with empathy even while he also very much loves his own country. He is also, in a manner I’ve personally found to be the case with many Moscow Patriarchate priests, down-to-earth, approachable, genuine and sensible—without compromising on matters of importance to the faith. He sometimes advocates a kind of ‘tough love’ with people who aren’t sincere in their spiritual demands on him, but it’s love all the same. He also understands the temptation and pull of the ‘hyperdox’ tendency, and gently urges moderation in its place.

Fr Artemy firmly champions the traditional nature of the Orthodox faith. He cautions against the consumption of popular media, and he urges young people in particular to embrace chastity with burning zeal. However, there are times when he comes down firmly on the ‘left’ side of things. He has high words of praise, for example, for the radical anarchist priest and new martyr Saint Valentin (Sventsitskii), whom he cites as ‘one of the most interesting writers of the century’. Writing as he did during the 1990s, he laments the disappearance of government assistance programmes for the poor and the destruction of the social fabric in Russia, which accompanied the fall of communism. Even though he has very little good to say about the atheistic Soviet state or its ideologues, he still has a heart which is clearly moved by the people—widows and orphans—who were dispossessed by the ruthless cutthroat gangster capitalism which took its place.

One thing Fr Artemy is very good at in this collection of essays, is referring people to works by other authors whom he considers to be better informed and better suited to guide seekers than himself. Fr Artemy is not being falsely modest here—his perspective is informed by a historical understanding that the startsy in ages past were much more spiritually-refined than the present-day teachers, who seem to have all but disappeared. He is hopeful, however, that people who earnestly seek guidance will find it in the writings of the Russian bishops of the nineteenth century. Fr Artemy is particularly fond, it seems, of St Feofan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov, and St Ignatii Brianchaninov, Bishop of the Caucasus and Stavropol. He recommends these bishops’ writings precisely because they are practical, and they do address questions which are applicable to the day-to-day life of new believers.

As a teacher, I was particularly gratified to note how well-attuned Fr Artemy is to the character and spiritual needs of young people. He talks about this at length in one of his essays, specifically about the spiritual life of teenagers. He strikes a very fine balance between the need for discipline (which all children do crave, at some level, for a sense of security) and the need for gentle guidance in self-motivated growth in the faith. Once again, he makes reference to St Feofan here: clearly there are some writings which I need to follow up on from this one. Fr Artemy’s Lenten reflections, as well, are of particular use and guidance to people approaching the sacrament of Confession.

This book is one I’d recommend, not necessarily to catechumens or the curious, but absolutely to new believers who are looking for a nudge in the right direction. Fr Artemy is a healthy and sane voice amid an English-language Orthodox Christian literary and social media landscape riddled with various neuroses and unhealthy fixations. Many thanks are owed to Nun Nectaria (McLees) and the folks at Road to Emmaus for making this volume available in English!

The Prayer of a Broken Heart: a review

Fr Paul Abernathy’s new book, The Prayer of a Broken Heart, is a splendidly multifaceted exploration—from a perspective rooted in the Orthodox Christian tradition—of the religious history and spiritual character of African slaves in America and their descendants. Speaking as a white American Orthodox Christian, I’m sure that what I got out of it would be very different than what a black American would get out of it. And I’m sure that a ‘cradle’ Orthodox Christian from within one of the traditionally-religious immigrant communities that came here after slavery had been abolished would get something else entirely out of it. However, the fact that The Prayer of a Broken Heart has something to say to each of these groups is a mark of its strengths. Although it is an adaptation of his seminary master’s thesis, precisely as a work of religious history it stands firmly on its own merits.

The Prayer of a Broken Heart may be said to have three strands. The first strand is an apologia of African-American Christianity as an, if not the, authentic and valid expression of African-American culture (as opposed to being a ‘white man’s religion’ or a ‘slaveowner creed’ foisted upon the slaves by their masters). The second strand is a portrait of African-American spirituality as it was formed through and the experiences of slavery, race-based terrorism, segregation and informal discrimination. And the third strand is an exploration of the commonalities between the African-American religious experience and the historical witness of the Orthodox Church. Interspersed through all of these strands are the accounts of pastoral experiences Fr Paul himself has had, working as a priest in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. The men and women whom he encounters have lives shaped by profound grief and loss. But that same suffering leads them, just as it has led many generations of their ancestors, before the Cross.

The historical aspect of the book is logically presented and carefully argued from primary source materials—slave narratives in particular. Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Charles Ball, Josiah Henson, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown and others are given space to speak in their own words from their own experiences. If Fr Paul’s authorial voice is somewhat more distant in these passages, that is all to his credit, as these narratives have their own power. The picture he draws out of these narratives is one which complicates and deflates both triumphalist-panglossian white accounts of slavery as a ‘civilising mission’, and anti-Christian tendencies in black-nationalist thought that portray Christianity as a ‘white man’s religion’. It becomes quite clear in these accounts that slave-owners had no interest whatsoever in edifying their slaves or leading them to Christianity. Their sole interest in their slaves was as productive property. In fact: slave-owners feared slaves’ expressions of religiosity, as the prayers of slaves were a powerful implicit witness to their spiritual equality before God.

Slave-owners were known to hold dances and parties with music and secular entertainments for their slaves to keep them ‘happy’. But religious gatherings were feared and forbidden. It was common for slave-owners to have slaves beaten cruelly or even killed for praying. Slaves would therefore organise prayer meetings in ‘hush harbours’: backwoods or basement locations hidden from the eyes of masters and overseers. For two hundred years, African-American Christianity was by necessity an ‘invisible institution’—a phrase borrowed from the religious historian Albert J Raboteau, whom Fr Paul Abernathy quotes at length. The message that he draws from this is clear: African-American Christianity, far from being received by slaves from masters, was attained and held in spite of the suppression of Christianity by their masters. Fr Paul tells us outright that the first records we have of slaves converting in any significant number to Christianity occurred during the first Great Awakening, when ‘New Light’ itinerant preachers would draw mixed-race crowds to revival meetings… often over the strenuous objections of the supine ‘Old Light’ pastors who were the representatives of the slave-owners’ religion.

This leads Fr Paul to open a descriptive account of the character of the Christianity of black America. Because it was an ‘invisible institution’—a church of the catacombs, shaped by the ever-present reality of persecution—it quickly became characterised by a radical trust in the will of God; an extended hope of justice however long deferred; a reliance upon the power of prayer; deference to the witness of elders who had experienced God’s action in their own lives; and an emphasis on salvific suffering and the openness of a ‘broken heart’ to God.

This provides an opening for Fr Paul Abernathy to explore the parallels between the African-American religious experience and Orthodox theology. To a certain extent, he counts on the Orthodox Christian section of his audience to have a great enough familiarity with the rudiments of hesychasm and the words of Psalm 50 to make certain connexions on their own. But he deftly illustrates how the sublative, broken-hearted and penitential character of African-American Christianity shares fundamental similarities with Orthodoxy—drawing upon numerous Patristic writings from Saint Isaac of Nineveh through Saint Gregory Palamas to Saints Silouan of Athos and Sophrony of Essex for demonstration.

Here Fr Paul Abernathy has a much clearer and direct case to make for a connexion than does, say, Hieromonk Damascene Christensen in Christ the Eternal Tao. Fr Paul has enough respect for the tradition he examines to acknowledge the clear differences between it and the Orthodox tradition. At the same time, though, he makes an honest appeal for the Orthodox ‘case’ with African-Americans. He notices in the remnants of African religion which were carried over into Christianity still more similarities with Orthodoxy: communality, the person as a web of relationships, the closeness of the human world to the Divine. And he notes in the tradition of African-American Christianity certain unmet needs and expectations in itself, most notably: a desire for self-denial, for discipline (explaining the appeal of the Nation of Islam), for mystical communion with God. And he argues that the Orthodox Church is capable of meeting these needs and expectations, as Protestant churches are quickly finding themselves deficient of these things.

Ultimately, though, this book is a labour of love. I use that term advisedly. Fr Paul Abernathy is not a nationalist of any sort: indeed, he considers pride (including national pride) to be the very source of many of the ills which the love of Christ must heal. For him, the most salient and salvific features of African-American Christianity are its insistence on forgiveness and on love of enemies: both insistences which are shared by the best aspects of Orthodox Christianity. And it is clear that he himself speaks from a position of love, even when he issues criticism.

His analysis is not without its critical dimension. Although he has nothing but words of praise for the musical tradition of the black spiritual (that true cry from the bottom of a broken heart, expressed in a cappella harmony!), he waxes particularly critical of modern African-American culture when it comes to popular music and consumption habits. He considers much of modern black musical and popular culture to be a form of propaganda which weakens the spirit—in much the same way as the secular dances and parties held by the slave-owners kept their slaves docile. I was rather surprised and a bit dismayed to read the harsh words he had even for blues and rock-‘n’-roll music, both of which (instrument-driven, individualistic, disillusioned and worldly) he views as a qualitative falling-away from the otherworldly hope and communal fellow-suffering epitomised by the spirituals.

Many thanks to Fr Paul Abernathy for publishing this work in a form which makes it available to a broad audience outside the academy. The Prayer of a Broken Heart is very much worth the time taken to read. For American Orthodox Christians in particular (and anyone interested in the history of American religion and constructive modern approaches to race relations generally), it is an excellent source to ingest, to ponder, and to begin conversations from.

Portrait of a monk

One of the books I’ve taken care to read this Lent, on the advice of my father-confessor, has been The Monk of Mount Athos by Saint Sophrony of Essex, who was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2019. It is a spiritual biography of Venerable Silouan of Athos, a monk who lived for most of his life in the Saint Panteleimon Monastery on the Holy Mountain. I found it to be an intensely powerful portrait of a spiritual struggler, and an important exposition on the importance of humility and love for enemies.

Bearing in mind that this is a book which was written by a monk, about a monk, it has a usefulness which extends considerably further than a small audience of Orthodox monastics. Humility is, after all, one of the virtues which is accessible to all regardless of their lot in life. In addition, the idea of what it means to be a person (any person) is explored at great depth in this work, making its appeal to a certain degree universal.

Saint Silouan was born in 1866 with the name of Semyon, very soon after the emancipation of the serfs, to the peasant Antonov family. His father Ivan, a gentle and hospitable man, was a formative early influence on his son’s spiritual growth. Of his father, Saint Silouan said:

‘I have never reached my father’s stature. He was quite illiterate: he even used to make a mistake in the Lord’s Prayer which he had learned by listening in church. But he was a man who was gentle and wise… When I think of my father, I say to myself: “This is the sort of staretz I would like to have.” He never got angry; he was always even-tempered and humble.’

Saint Silouan recalled to Sophrony two stories which illustrated his father’s character—one in which he spent a night in fornication with a girl he liked, and the next morning his father didn’t scold or beat him, but merely asked after him and told him that his heart was troubled for him. This mild rebuke from Ivan Antonov caused the young Semyon more mortification than either yelling or blows would have done. In another instance, Semyon gave his father some pork to eat on a Friday, and his father waited until six months later to correct him on that point, out of care for him.

Semyon, as can be seen from these stories, never became an atheist or a ‘freethinker’, but he passed his youth in a somewhat careless way. He was strong, tall, handsome and a bit over-sure of himself. However, he had a troubling vision of himself swallowing a snake, and heard the voice of the Theotokos calling him to repentance in the wake of this dream, after which he was never quite the same. He joined the military at his father’s behest, but his true desire was to become a monk. After finishing his term of service, he visited the church of Saint John of Kronstadt, where in a letter he besought the priest’s prayers for him as he journeyed to Mount Athos.

He joined the monastery of Saint Panteleimon as a novice, and his struggle to master himself began in earnest. He went to work carrying heavy sacks of grain up to the mill to be ground into flour for the monks’ nourishment. He recounts how on the journey he was tormented the entire way there by visions and sensations of the flames of hell. He endeavoured long to cleanse his heart, in order to escape from these visions, but ultimately it was only an act of grace from above which delivered him—a vision of Christ. This grace came to him, and left him again—leaving him to struggle against the demons. However, he received this wisdom from the visions: ‘Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.’

This wisdom was salutary for Saint Silouan, and the proof that it came from God consisted in this: that it didn’t stoke his pride, but rather helped him to cultivate a spirit of humility. When he kept his mind in hell, it spurred him to compassion for those around him whose salvation he desired. The true mark of humility, Saint Silouan came to realise, was to be found in love for enemies. His prayers were therefore directed not only to his own salvation, but to the salvation of the world. One can see this in such episodes that Saint Sophrony relates:

I remember a conversation between [Father Silouan] and a certain hermit who declared with evident satisfaction:

‘God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.’

Obviously upset, the Staretz said:

‘Tell me, supposing you went to paradise and there looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire—would you feel happy?’

‘It can't be helped. It would be their own fault,’ said the hermit.

The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance.

‘Love could not bear that,’ he said. ‘We must pray for all.’

And again:

Among the stewards was a capable monk, Father P, who was outstandingly capable, yet somehow always unlucky—his initiatives usually met with no sympathy among the fathers and his undertakings often ended in failure.

One day, after one such enterprise had resulted in disaster, he was subjected to harsh criticism at the stewards’ table. Father Silouan was present, but took no part in the ‘prosecution’. One of the stewards, Father M, turned to him and said:

‘You are silent, Father Silouan! That means you side with Father P and are indifferent to the interests of the monastery. You don’t mind the damage he has caused the community.’

Father Silouan said nothing but quickly finished eating and then went up to Father M who by that time had also left the table.

‘Father M—how many years have you been in the monastery?’

‘Thirty-five.’

‘Did you ever hear me criticise anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Then why do you want me to begin with Father P?’

Disconcerted, Father M replied shamefacedly:

‘Forgive me.’

‘God will forgive.’

And yet again:

Father Silouan’s attitude towards those who differed from him was characterised by a sincere desire to see what was good in them, and not to offend them in anything that they held sacred. He always remained himself, convinced that ‘salvation lies in Christ-like humility’, and in the strength of this humility he strove with his whole soul to understand every man at his best. He found the way to the heart of everyone—to his capacity for loving Christ.

I remember a conversation he had with a certain archimandrite engaged on missionary work. Hearing from the latter’s own lips how severe he was in his sermons, how harshly he pronounced judgement upon other faiths, the Staretz said to him:

‘Father, people feel in their souls when they are doing anything right, so that if you condemn their faith they will not listen to you. But if you were to confirm that they were really doing well, and then gently point out their mistakes and show them what they ought to put right, then they would listen to you. God is love, and therefore the preaching of His Word must always proceed from love, and both preacher and listener will profit. But if you do nothing but condemn, the soul of the people will not hear, and no good will come of such preaching.’

As we can see from such passages, the visions which Father Silouan was given when he was younger, far from turning him harsh or prideful, instead developed in him those qualities which he had so loved in his [biological] father: meekness, tenderness, and an open heart ready to condole the suffering. He retained these qualities all his life, being able to turn his thoughts back upon Christ with a movement of the mind downward and inward, but at the end of his life he said sadly of himself: ‘I have not yet learned humility.’

I found that this book was also of interest on account of Saint Sophrony’s meditations, in reflecting upon the life of Saint Silouan, on the Orthodox Church’s vision of humanity. Because the human being is made in the image of God, and God is Three Hypostases in One Essence, it follows therefore that ‘according to the second commandment, Love thy neighbour as thyself, each of us must and can comprise all mankind in his own personal being, in the same way as each of the three Persons of the Godhead contains the fulness of Divine Being’. The cold, callous individualism of a Jordan Peterson or a Joel Osteen finds no daylight with the self-emptying, neighbour-seeking, fellow-suffering spirituality of a Saint Silouan. ‘Each time we refuse to take on ourselves the blame for the common evil, for the deeds of our neighbour, we are repeating the [sin of Adam] and likewise shattering the unity of Man.’

At the same time, attaining to the second commandment in its plenitude as shown in this spiritual biography, is a lifelong struggle for most. Only those who are perfect, those who are entirely like Christ, may be called human beings in the full theological depth of the word; most of us are in fact human becomings. The image of God is stamped indelibly upon us, and therefore we are capable of receiving grace. This capability is deserving of its full measure of respect, even if it is abused or neglected. But we still struggle to attain the Edenic likeness of man to God in this life, and we find we are not capable of it on our own. Yet many who are in the Orthodox Church, and even the leadership of the same Constantinopolitan jurisdiction which glorified Saint Sophrony three years ago, are seeking to downplay or obviate this ‘hard saying’—in order to conform the Church’s anthropology to a model more amenable to secular accounts and discourses of rights.

(It can be an understandable reflex to take refuge in a language of individual rights in order to safeguard against secular-statist tyrannies. However, the experience of the last forty-five years of economic history in the West shows that this reflex does not and cannot answer the increasingly urgent and dire challenges that arise to the dignity of the person from powerful and unaccountable non-state agencies. More so than from the state, the human person is nowadays in the most danger from: banks; multinational energy, pharma, telecom and food corporations; social media platforms; and media monopolies which cater to emotions over reason. These do not operate by means of legal threats or open encroachments on rights; they operate on a more insidious level of stirring the passions at a subconscious level, rendering legal threats unnecessary.)

Going back to the point about this writing from Saint Sophrony being applicable to more than just monks, I’m finding that this monastic portrait ‘pairs’ quite nicely with the book I’m currently reading, The Prayer of a Broken Heart by Fr Paul Abernathy of Pittsburgh. The Prayer of a Broken Heart speaks of the spiritual tradition of the descendants of African slaves in the Americas, and makes particular note of how the intuitive nature of that spiritual tradition, finding redemption in the midst of physical and moral and political suffering, ‘rhymes’ in many ways with the witness of the Orthodox Church. (Fr Paul Abernathy even quotes directly from Saint Sophrony’s biography of Saint Silouan!) The importance of humility, forgiveness and enemy-love to the African-American spiritual tradition, far from being a ‘weakness’ of the ‘white man’s religion’, is in fact one of the major sources of spiritual strength which black Americans continue, as generations of their ancestors have done, to draw upon.

I will review Fr Paul Abernathy’s book in the very near future, as it deserves its own space for discussion. I find, however, that The Monk of Mount Athos is a very worthy read. If for no other reason, than that it shows me how much further I have yet to climb in order to begin to love my neighbour—and to spur me to action in making that effort.

The Skidelskys: toward a theory of satiety

My latest Lenten reading—and to be sure, it very much is Lenten reading—comes from two non-religious Britons: Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky, and his son Dr Edward Skidelsky: How Much Is Enough? Robert Skidelsky is an economist, and his son Edward is a philosopher, but between them Skidelsky père et fils here have given us a remarkable piece of writing that sits directly at the crux between the two disciplines.

It is also not entirely devoid of religious interest. The Lenten advice of the Holy Fathers is to ‘eat not to satiety’, but the Skidelskys point out with some degree of alarm that the very concept of satiety has been all but demolished in modern consumer culture. The wants of even the most wealthy and productive societies seem to be bottomless, creating ever newer and more ingenious ways of satisfying them—and yet our median quality of life has not improved accordingly. To the Skidelskys, this is not so much an economic problem in itself, as it is a humanities problem—one might go so far as to call it a philosophical or even religious problem.

The starting point for Robert Skidelsky, of course, is Keynes: in particular, a forward-looking utopian essay he delivered in 1928 entitled ‘Economic Possibilities’. He predicted that with greater means and capacities, the dynamo of capitalism would putter out, ushering an era of more humane and human-sized values:

I see us free to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take the least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field, who toil not neither do they spin.

Keynes’s prediction, according to all of the empirical data available to hand in the OECD countries as of 2012 (when this book was written), went very badly awry. The rich nations are wealthier and more technologically-advanced than ever, but working hours, far from having decreased, have gone up. Wages have stayed stagnant. Life satisfaction has not improved with increased productivity. The consumer culture is characterised by unfulfilling conspicuous consumption among the rich and increasing desperation among the poor. The utopia of plenty and ease that the capitalist dynamo promised has grown further and further from view, while the dynamo keeps churning away under the banner of the elusive concept of ‘utility’.

The Skidelskys take note that the idea, let alone possibility, of unlimited growth without purpose is something very recent and unprecedented in human experience—and would have been an object of horror to the best and brightest minds of the classical civilisations. Aristotle, Confucius, the Dharmasutras, and later the Christian Gospels and the epistles of Saint Paul, all take a very dubious view of the whole enterprise of wealth acquisition—and although each of these classical sources held that the mercantile profession had its place and was necessary to the flourishing of any society, it was in no case the most virtuous of pursuits, and presented unique dangers to the holistic well-being of the one engaged in it. The Skidelskys sketch out a brief—but accurate and engaging—treatment of each of these three world philosophical traditions and their attitudes toward wealth, showing in each case that wealth is not considered an end in itself but always a means to some greater end. The Skidelskys, returning to Keynes’s essay and his hearkening to those who ‘pluck the day virtuously and well’, call the object of this Aristotelian-Confucian-Christian-Dharmic striving ‘the good life’.

They take observance, as well, of two of the major challenges to the growth-at-all-costs model of late capitalism. The first challenge to the late-capitalist model is the idea of the ‘gross national happiness’. The second challenge is that posed by the green movement, by environmental economics and both ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ ecology.

The Skidelskys raise two objections to the ‘happiness economics’ approach. The first one is empirical. How do we know that the ‘happiness’ which people self-report on surveys of life satisfaction, for example, is actually reflective of their circumstances and overall well-being? Ultimately, despite the good intentions of said surveys and the people making use of them, what they’re doing is swapping out one black box (that of ‘utility’) for another (that of ‘happiness’). We don’t get to look inside that black box to see what makes it tick, and ultimately we are called on to accept the tautological reasoning of such surveys if we are to make use of that data.

The other objection the Skidelskys raise is moral. What if someone were to invent a wonder drug like the soma from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or what if someone were to invent a mechanical method of stimulating the pleasure centres of the brain (like BTL chips in Shadowrun, or Garak’s Obsidian Order endorphin implant in the DS9 episode ‘The Wire’)? What if a cheap and easy way were found to fool the brain into thinking it’s happy, even if the actual conditions of the user’s life were miserable? The Skidelskys assert that happiness economics, despite happiness economists’ protestations to the legal and rights-based limits of their focus, provides no real answer to this. If such ‘quick fixes’ made their way onto the market, it wouldn’t take a jaded cynical cyberpunk to understand that an innumerable, and intolerable, number of people would be tempted by them. Ultimately, the Skidelskys assert, with Solzhenitsyn, that it simply isn’t a good enough solution to replace the idol of growth with the idol of happiness.

They then turn to the ‘green’ approach. Of the Skidelskys’ three critiques, this one is the mildest and most sympathetic, although they do take intense issue both with some of the more-moderate and some of the more-radical environmentalist postures. Against the moderates, the Skidelskys assert that the logic they deploy is ultimately the same utilitarian cost-benefit logic deployed by mainstream neoclassical economists, only extended to a longer term. The moderates treat nature as something instrumental to a black-box ideal of human utility. Against the radicals, they assert that the totally-ascetic deontology of the ‘deep ecologists’ is a kind of frenzied Puritanism in the style of Cromwell and Savonarola. They detect—and in some cases they don’t have to dig very far to find made explicit—a fire-and-brimstone sermonising and warnings of all humankind as sinners in the hands of an angry goddess (said goddess being, naturally, Gaia).

The Skidelskys do want us to take a ‘deep’ consideration of nature, however. They are actually not too far in their actual understanding of ecology from writers like EF Schumacher or Wendell Berry. Unlike the moderates who approach nature with the detached attitude of dilettantes, and radicals for whom all human activity which exerts a force of change on nature is by that very fact ‘sinful’, the Skidelskys issue a call for active human engagement with and investment in nature—by farming, by fishing and by gardening, for example. Appreciation for nature on a local and personal scale is both salutary for ecosystems and healthy for the human soul.

After having launched a full broadside against the broken promises of capitalism and the growth ideology, a strong critique against the ‘happiness’ economists, and a milder and friendlier critique against the ecological economists, the Skidelskys lay their cards on the table. They articulate, over-against the liberal advocates (such as Rawls and Nussbaum) of the value-neutral state, a need for a positive doctrine of the ‘good life’ supported by public policy. This concept contains the basic goods of: health, security, respect, leisure, friendship (including family both nuclear and extended), personality and harmony with nature.

This is precisely the point at which How Much Is Enough? becomes something of a Tory radical altar call—and a remarkably effective and stirring one at that, one which made me want to dust off the old Cavalier regalia (figuratively speaking). It is not accidental that, despite the Skidelskys’ clear and insistent intellectual debt to Keynes, they deliberately make mention and use of a rather older, venerable but neglected strain of English economic thought in John Ruskin and William Morris. They anticipate, and to a certain extent welcome, the objection that they are advocating paternalism. Yes, say Robert and Edward Skidelsky, we are paternalists, but our paternalism is of a non-coercive sort which is compatible with life in a democratic society. What’s more: in making our choices about what the state should value explicit (rather than the implicit values which get smuggled in with the pursuit of growth or happiness), at least we’re being honest paternalists rather than ‘backdoor paternalists’.

Honestly, I find the Skidelskys’ modest and understated, but at the same time heartfelt, embrace of what winds up as a ‘crunchy conservative’ or a ‘red Tory’ position a bit more palatable than the recent offerings from, say, Milbank and Blond. The Skidelskys affirm their admiration for and inspiration from Catholic social theory, and they are at the very least willing to articulate a positive concept of the good life while allowing for alternative models elsewhere. They certainly aren’t advocating for cultural (or any other kind of) imperialism aimed at Africa, India, China or Russia—they in fact welcome alternative positive conceptions of the ‘good life’ which are applicable to different cultural contexts. (In fact, I was pleasantly tickled by their approving quote of Met. Anthony Bloom when discussing the paucity of black-box accounts of ‘happiness’.) On the other hand, the very same modesty of their approach to policy manifests in a similar modesty when it comes to policy recommendations.

The spread of policy fixes that Robert and Edward Skidelsky put forward are, as one might expect, a mixture of social-democratic supports to family life and leisure on the one hand, and social-conservative disincentives to conspicuous consumption on the other. They advocate for legislation enforcing a maximum work week for most businesses (with SMEs and family-run shops being possibly exempt), and also for a universal basic income, though their preference—in line with Keynes’s preference for the socialisation of investment—is for that basic income to be in the form of a capital dividend rather than a monthly cheque. They advocate for a range of taxation schemes meant to incentivise various aspects of the good life and disincentivise threats to it: including Tobin taxes on financial instrument transactions (whose proceeds would fund an endowment furnishing the capital dividend for all citizens) and a progressive consumption tax, as well as the elimination of tax policies which allow businesses to write off expenditures on advertising. Although they don’t object to immigration on principle, as well, they see the wisdom of taking certain legal precautions against mass immigration—they (quite rightly) don’t want to see their society bifurcate into another Dubai, with a permanent underclass of migrant helots.

If there’s a weak spot in How Much Is Enough?, I find it’s this last chapter. The sheer mildness with which these policy proposals at the end are put forward seems quite frankly quaint (eleven years out from its date of publication, when all the problems they observe in the capitalist dynamo have worsened dramatically). Personally (and this is me being more ‘red’ than ‘Tory’ again) I’d have liked to see them stump for some good old rabble-rousing schemes like Social Credit, the Safety Fund, the Subtreasury Plan, postal savings banks or nationalisation of rail and telecom. But perhaps that isn’t the point. This book sets out to raise the valid philosophical questions which should lie at the very heart of the economic discipline—what is our wealth for? What is our time for? This book is at its most powerful and thought-provoking when it is not only raising these questions but exploring their implications.

The life and frustrated politics of John B Rayner

For Black History Month last month, I read a biography by Gregg Cantrell: Feeding the Wolf: John B Rayner and the Politics of Race, 1850-1918. As with a lot of books about race relations in America at the time of and after the Civil War, it’s a rather bracing and sobering read. But it says some fairly valuable and needful things that we should pay attention to now, if we want to actually improve things in America for poor people of all races. There are some specific messages which the modern-day left (particularly left anti-war voices) would do well to heed.

John Baptis Rayner was the illegitimate son of a slaveholding white North Carolina planter, Kenneth Rayner, in the year 1850. His mother, 15-year-old Mary Ricks, was at the time Kenneth Rayner’s slave—and a mulatto, herself the product of an exploitative union between white master and black slave. Even though he could pass for white, John B Rayner spent the first thirteen years of his life as his biological father’s property.

There were certain elements of Rayner’s upbringing which were clothed in layers of genteel mendacity. Such occurrences were all too common, as one quickly realises upon reading Frank Tannenbaum’s history Slave and Citizen. Biracial children—mulattos—occurred wherever slavery occurred. However, how they were treated depended a great deal on the cultural context they grew up in. Although the African slave trade and chattel slavery were every bit as brutal and exploitative in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries as they were in English-speaking countries, attitudes toward freedmen and mulattos were very different. In general, Latin American mestizos were accorded the rights of free men, and their social status was not considered automatically inferior to white men of a similar class—partly on account of residual, humane Catholic sensibilities that had never sat too comfortably alongside the brute fact of slavery and colonial expansion. This was not the case for English-speaking mulattos of slave parentage, who were automatically considered slaves under the law, and who were socially considered inferior to whites.

Such was the case with John B Rayner’s upbringing. His father Kenneth Rayner was dynamic, energetic, well-spoken, well-educated, independent-minded, politically-active and (considering his time, place and social position) fairly humane, albeit possessed of a certain degree of condescending paternalism. These were all traits he passed on to his illegitimate son. Rayner received a high-quality education at his biological father’s behest, grounded in the classics of the Western canon (from which he frequently enjoyed quoting). But despite his clear intellectual and political talents, on account of his mixed-race parentage he was both legally unfree, and barred irrevocably from the upper echelons of Southern society in which his father moved, in which he was considered a ‘white n—r’. And then, after the Civil War and the defeat of the landlord class, Kenneth Rayner packed up and moved his family northward, leaving his former slaves, including his own son, behind without any further social contact, without any compunctions or qualms.

Rayner himself moved to Texas after a brief flirtation with political life under Radical Reconstruction. His clear talents managed to be noticed by the postwar state government, and he attained office as a Republican justice of the peace. He also became a Baptist minister and enjoyed a certain degree of prominence sermonising against alcohol. However, after marrying, he moved to Texas and quickly became involved in the fledgling People’s Party there.

Throughout his life, the one constant that defined Rayner’s political sympathies was that he was squarely against the Dixiecrat contingent that clung to white supremacy. Not only did he personally suffer from the laws and unwritten rules which held him to be an inferior on account of his ancestry, but he also held from his own education that such a caste system was senseless and self-defeating. There’s every reason to believe that Rayner embraced with the zeal of the converted all the economic principles of the new People’s Party—including chartalism, the graduated income tax, the Subtreasury Plan, and state ownership of transit and communication infrastructure. But his primary goal was to build up a political vehicle for black people which would neither deliberately oppress them and consign them to second-class personhood (as the Democrats did), nor abandon them to the vagaries of the political and economic winds (as the Republicans had after the engineered ‘failure’ of Reconstruction). Even though the People’s Party never managed to actively advocate for full social equality between blacks and whites, their emphasis on economic betterment and their opposition to centralised financial and political power seemed to Rayner to offer blacks the best hope for social and political advancement.

Rayner charged headlong into the political field on the behalf of his new party. He was the single most active and popular public speaker on the East Texas circuit, and he bent his formidable energies, intelligence and oratorical skill toward spreading the Populist gospel among poor black tenant farmers and day-labourers, and bringing them into the new sheepfold. He was admired on this account both by his black and his white colleagues, and his speeches invariably drew a mixed-race crowd, who stood together without segregating. It was particularly interesting to read about how poor white East Texas tenant farmers would stand up and protect John Rayner with their bodies if he came under threat by armed enforcers from the old ‘Democracy’, the moneyed political opposition.

Two conditions conspired to thwart and scatter the Populist insurgency in 1890’s East Texas. The first condition was the heated and desperate appeal by the Democratic Party to the racial paranoia of poor whites. In lurid language the Democratic party machine and its agents in the press described the coming upheaval and overthrow of all civilised institutions, if the Populists came to power and handed the organs of the state over to a mongrel, mixed-race mob. The Texas Populists, to their credit, had taken a firm and principled stand on equal jury representation for blacks—but they wouldn’t go further than that. And even that was too far for many poor white Texans. But through a concerted campaign of fearmongering, race-baiting, open ballot fraud, armed intimidation, violence and even murder, the Democratic party machine managed to turn back the Populist tide in several key districts.

The second condition which thwarted the Texas Populists was the fateful decision by the national People’s Party to pursue a tactic of fusion with the Democratic ticket. Although the Democrats were still in many senses the party of old Southern money and furnishing merchants, within the party there were reformist voices like William Jennings Bryan who could effectively channel the popular anger against the coastal plutocracy in their rhetoric, while remaining conveniently flexible on matters of actual policy. The Populists acceded, fatally, to a deal whereby they would endorse Bryan on the national Democratic ticket in exchange for a ‘bimetallic’ plank in the Democratic platform (itself a gelding of the chartalist principles of the Omaha Platform). The entire contingent of Texas Populists greeted this news with dismay and horror—and pursued the opposite policy to the national party: advocating a Republican vote for McKinley at the national level in exchange for Republican support for the Populist candidate for Texas governor, Jerome Claiborne Kearby. Kearby lost, on account of the dirty and desperate Democratic campaign against him described above. And the Populists never recovered from their losses in 1896, either nationally or at the state level.

Rayner became deeply disillusioned with politics after this. He grew particularly bitter against the poor whites who had, in his view, abandoned the Populist cause and left their poor black brothers to the (in some cases very literal) dogs. But he also became more and moreso an advocate of political quietism and gradualism in the black community. This was where the old paternalistic instincts he’d inherited from his white planter father came back to the fore. From the Southern black perspective, such messages might come credibly from, say, a Booker T Washington who shared the class and cultural background of the men he addressed; but they weren’t regarded as kindly when they came from a man of high-flown oratory who could pass for white. From the sobering experience of the thwarted Populist insurgency, he maintained (at least in public) that black men in the South had to build up better habits of life and become more virtuous before they could begin to be trusted with political power. And so he turned his energies instead to establishing black schools in East Texas: Conroe Normal and Industrial College and the Farmer’s Improvement Society.

In his pursuit of funds and patronage for these schools, Rayner had to forge relationships with some of his old adversaries—including the wealthy Dixiecrat and Houston lumber magnate John Henry Kirby. Rayner’s public speech and writing at this point in his life grew increasingly pathetic on account of these new ties. He began forging an image of himself as a contented black man of the Old South, a former ‘faithful slave’. He began holding forth that the poor black man has no better friend than the Southern white man, and he incessantly cautioned against black people moving too fast or agitating too loudly. These efforts to win the patronage of wealthy whites earned his new school projects very little material remuneration, and came at—as appears from the writings Rayner left toward the end of his life—a considerable cost to his sense of self-worth.

Both Conroe and FIS eventually severed their ties with Rayner, though Cantrell informs us that the primary sources don’t really give us a clear picture of the reasons. He surmises that it could have been because of Rayner’s sycophantic public speeches (which were becoming increasingly annoying to a younger generation of black men who were struggling against incessant campaigns of racial violence as well as legal segregation), or it could have been because of Rayner’s involvement with anti-Prohibition activism (which, given the heavy moralistic demands on the behaviour of poor black men, was an embarrassment to these schools).

At the same time, Cantrell paints us a very credible picture of why Rayner joined forces with the East Texas brewers. From the perspective of a Southern black man at the dawn of the twentieth century, the most dangerous kind of Dixiecrat was the reformist, ‘progressive’ Bryan-style Dixiecrat. Bryan himself may or may not have harboured the more odious and violent kind of white-supremacist sentiments, but he certainly opened the floodgates to a particular brand of new Democrat who did. The reformist Democrats who came after William Jennings Bryan often championed silver coinage, women’s suffrage, anti-imperialism and (white) labour unions, as well as Prohibition. But they also gave voice to some of the most vicious and vitriolic forms of anti-black bigotry, defended lynching and intransigently opposed even the smallest concessions to blacks’ political liberties. Rayner evidently decided that it was better to side with (plutocratic, reactionary, laissez-faire, but only mildly anti-black) ‘wet’ Democrats, than with (producerist, ‘progressive’, interventionist, but virulently-racist) ‘dry’ Democrats.

Rayner did make one final push for integration of the armed forces during the Great War. But his final years were frustrated, lonely and miserable. His health began to fail. When he was out walking his dog, the white sheriff beat the elderly Rayner for not having a tag on his pet—and he never recovered from the beating. In his last years his only solace lay in writing collections of aphorisms which were published only long after his death—and which showed that he had never truly given up on his old Populist convictions, that he was convinced of the vileness and stupidity of white supremacy, and that what hopes he had left were in the practical education of ordinary black men and women. However, as far as we know, at the end of his life none of his black acquaintance outside his immediate family circle knew of this. To them, Rayner was an embarrassing anachronism bereft of self-respect, ‘feeding the wolf’ of white supremacy, which would never be sated on what he sacrificed to it. To the white acquaintance whose opinions (and funds) he courted with too little success, Rayner was hardly remembered at all.

‘There is little that one can call encouraging in the story of John B Rayner,’ writes Gregg Cantrell, ‘for it is mostly a story of injustice, failure, and the humiliation of a man whose lifelong efforts to do good met with repeated frustration—primarily because of the distorting power of racism.’ The high point of Rayner’s career was the Populist insurgency of the 1890s, a rare period in Southern history when poor blacks and poor whites stood side-by-side and demanded fair and equal treatment against a bipartisan political establishment which held both groups in contempt.

Rayner’s story should be taken as a cautionary tale to modern populistic movements which are trying to bridge the left-right gap in the same way the late nineteenth-century People’s Party did. It would be naïve to assume that the old dynamics of American politics have ever disappeared completely. The critique offered by black commentators of—to give one recent example—the ‘Rage Against the War Machine’ rally rhymes in a particularly uncomfortable way with the old internal disputes within the original People’s Party, and the betrayal of true-believing, full-platform, midroader Populism by the (exclusively-white) advocates of ‘fusion’ with the Democrats. Although cross-ideological coalitions to urge action on one particular issue are a common and necessary feature of any kind of mass-based politics, there is a particular danger which comes when good causes entertain the notion of ‘fusing’ with political forces that are entirely inimical to one’s goals. In the case of Populism, the two major parties were able to use the wedge of racism to split the movement. The anti-war movement should take care not to let the same happen to it.

I’d say that this biography is one that I’m happy I read, though it was by no means particularly happy reading. On the other hand, Gregg Cantrell’s book also introduced me, in its afterword, to the brilliant and colourful career of John B Rayner’s Catholic grandson: Lt Ahmed Arabi ‘Sammy’ Rayner, Jr. Sammy Rayner had a career in the United States Air Force as one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, became a mortician in Chicago where he assisted his father’s business—including the open-air casket funeral of Emmitt Till, protested against the Vietnam War, was investigated by the FBI for supposed links to the Black Panthers, and ran against the Daley machine in Chicago and won as an Independent alderman. There’s another biography I’d be more than happy to read.