Back in 2005, Ukrainian melodic heavy metal band Big History put out their first and only album Perpetuum Mobile. The title of one of their songs on that album is literally “Kievan Rus’”. Here are the full lyrics to the song:
Будущего вряд ли хватит что бы прошлое объять,
А вдруг солнце на закате повернет сегодня в спять.
Грянет гром и лопнет небо чрева тайны обнажив,
Тайны прадедов и дедов ты мне чрево расскажи.
Как хватало их терпенья мудро и достойно ждать и
до последнего мгновенья врага ближе подпускать.
Время, стерпит, все стерпит и простит –
Забудет на всегда...
Солнце, светит на Киевской Руси и горе не беда, если все как один всегда.
Точит меч словян и не угостит огонь тысяч душ Киевской Руси.
Я несу свой крест, радость и в грусть,
Мне с тобой тепло Киевская Русь.
Горы в прошлое стремятся , будущего не бояться, нам
Завещано судьбой, пусть разрушать мы отстроим,
А хотят войны то к бою, нам собраться не в первой.
Утро - вечера мудрее, а призыв еще сильнее "Встань!"
Опять плетется сеть. Алчных, потных и строптивых,
Хитро-мудро нагло лживых норм, придется поучить
"Нет сил тепеть!"
Время, стерпит, все стерпит и простит –
Забудет на всегда...
Солнце, светит на Киевской Руси и горе не беда, если все, как один всегда.
Точит меч словян и не угостит огонь тысяч душ Киевской Руси.
Я несу свой крест, радость и в грусть,
Мне с тобой тепло Киевская Русь.
I’m not going to provide a full translation here, but Google does a fairly good job getting the gist. One thing that stands out about such a folk/power metal song is that the historical consciousness of Big History is not romantic or glorious, in no way nationalistic. This song is elegiac in tone, and laments how little has been learned since the heyday of the Kievan polity. It also acknowledges the ‘warmth’ of that time despite how the reality failed to match up to the ideal.
Big History broke up after this album. The main guitarist Evgenii Burykh and vocalist Viktor Vlasov formed the band Берег Неба, which was also located in Krasnodon, while the drummer Rodion Kushnir moved to Berdyans’k. Not sure what happened to bassist Igor Levchenko. The band members, who have this deep and tragic awareness of history, ultimately sided with the autonomists in the Donbass against the Ukrainian government, in part because of the critical love of their homeland which this song displays. The current war displays the same tendencies that Big History laments in ‘Киевская Русь’.
Prime power metal from Krasnodon. Excellent musicianship and a definite flair for classic rock vibes: little wonder they chose to round off their only studio album with a cover of Deep Purple’s ‘Burn’. Valery Bykov really puts in the effort in on that melodic line on this song. Sadly, the band broke up in 2014, right around the time the SBU rolled up in force in the area. Hopefully they get back together and follow up this album.
The Saint Petersburg formation August (or Август) was one of the first-ever Soviet rock bands, and they shared a label (Melodiya) with other acts like Black Coffee, Master and Cruise. At first they played a rather eclectic mixture of pop-rock, art-rock and heavy metal (in part due to the Soviets’ disapproval of certain styles of rock music), but later on their style congealed into something similar to Rainbow or Deep Purple or Uriah Heep. Their first album, from which this song comes, was a runaway success. Enjoy!
Were it not seemly to us, brothers,
To begin in ancient diction
The tales of the toils of the army
Of Igor, Igor Svyatoslavič?
Or to begin this song
In accordance with the ballads of this time,
And not like the invention of Boyan?
One of the few stabs I’ve made at reading again so far this year has been a reread of The Tale of the Armament of Igor. This poetic lamentation of a failed attempt by a prince of Rus’, Igor Svyatoslavič, to stage a raid on the attacking Cumans is the earliest extant example of literature in the Old Russian language, dating to the late 1100s. In addition to the themes of heroism in hopeless battles, grief and exile, the Tale also spends a great deal of time exhorting the princes of Rus’ to put aside their personal ambitions and greed, and unite in the face of a common enemy.
I found a great deal more in it on this third read-through than on my first. The poem rises and falls in mood, between the high triumphant martial imagery of Igor’s exhortations to the defence of the Russian land, and the vast desolate lamentation of Yaroslavna on the walls of Putivl, and finally returning again to a tone of hope in the voice of the poet Boyan. There is much in this poem that is still obscure to me, and that may be owing to my poor Russian.
However, I am still struck by the beauty of the natural imagery of the poem. One can almost hear the cries of falcons, the calls of magpies and crows, in the verse itself. The rivers speak, especially the Donets River with whom Igor converses in his Cuman exile (and which is today still the site of tragic bloodletting and destruction between brothers). The poet invokes the sun and the aurora borealis. Yaroslavna invokes the wind and the sky in her lamentations.
For brother spake to brother: ‘This is mine, and that is also mine!’
And the princes began to pronounce of a paltry thing, ‘This is great,’
And themselves amongst them to forge feuds…
I have found myself unable to write, and increasingly unable to read productively, on account of the war. I am caught between a love of Russia which rebukes their paranoia, and a love of the Ukraine which reproaches their pride and greed, and to see them fall upon each other with this insane bloodlust—Ukrainians against the civilians of Seversky Donets; and Russians against the Ukrainians—breaks the heart. Once again, ‘Kiev groaned with mourning, and Černigov with disasters.’ I find that I resonate much more, given the state of current events, with the lamentations of Svyatoslav over the deaths of his sons, and that of Yaroslavna over the fate of Igor.
This is a conflict which would not have happened, if the Russian leadership had not, under the fear of a threat to its borders, been goaded into an attack by the provocations of the Western powers on the Black Sea. This is also, much more so, a conflict which would not have happened if the Ukrainian oligarchs who foisted the Maidan upon them in 2014 at the instigation of the same Western powers, had not said to the people of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, ‘this is mine, and that is also mine’—and then sent in the SBU and the fascist paramilitaries to destroy them. I hate that the people of the Donbass have been dying needlessly for the past eight years at the hands of their own government, and I hate more that Ukrainians are dying still in numbers equally great, at the hands of an attacking army. Most of all I hate the injustices and machinations and engineered policies of division and exploitation in Washington and London that brought all of this about.
Then in the time of Oleg, Boris wrought for evil: feuds were sown and grew apace.
The life of the scion of Dažbog was wasted,
In the factions of the princes and the generations of mankind were shortened.
What more can be said now? Perhaps the Russian band Aria said it already with their elegiac ‘Ballad of an Old Russian Warrior’:
Or perhaps the anonymous poet in the tradition of Boyan said it best: Далеко! Ночь меркнет.
Peavy Wagner is back, and more pissed-off than ever. Honestly, though, who can blame him? The idolatry of the global elites, and the way that they have been running the world, is indeed enraging, and Rage gives the perfect answer to it here. Enjoy!
Two articles that came out earlier today in American Compass that are deliberately paired off with each other, one on either side of the political divide, attempt to explore the ‘deadly sins’ of the left and the right. The first article, written by Ruy Teixeira, purports to explore the five deadly sins of the American left: idpol, retro-socialism, catastrophism, growth-phobia and techno-pessimism. And the second article, written by Henry Olson, explores the three deadly sins of the American right: market fundamentalism, snobbery and hubris. Both of these articles are well-intentioned attempts at introspection and self-examination of certain political mythologies and forms of inertia that have accumulated largely through the ‘bubble’ effect; and I appreciate them both for attempting to concentrate and explore the blindnesses, weaknesses and self-indulgences inherent in the political lifeworlds that most Americans now inhabit.
However, I would – to extend the metaphor slightly – like to play devil’s advocate to each. When it comes to discussions of ‘sin’ what we are really discussing is a moral anthropology and the relationship of man to the divine, and as such these questions are fundamentally religious in character. I would therefore like to think I am approaching these from a point of view that is faithfully Orthodox Christian in accordance with what is to date still the most trenchant and insightful document articulating the political and social values of the Church, though ultimately I must leave that to my confessor and to the hierarchs of my Church to judge.
Regarding the first article, by Teixeira. I agree with some of its central tenets. Firstly, I agree with Mr Teixeira that the American left suffers intensely from its fixation on identity politics, which despite the rhetoric of ‘intersectionality’ actually only serve to fracture the body politic into various grievance groups, and cast all social problems through a lens of oppression. I also agree that the left has allowed itself to be coopted by an elite politics which hides, underneath a ‘green’ veneer, a thoroughly nasty and anti-human Malthusian streak (of which I’ve been consistently critical these past eight years), and which tends to see poor people as a dead-weight problem rather than equal agents and partners in the political process. Insofar as he shares these points with the ‘realist left’, I tend to agree with him.
However, I would push back on a couple of the assumptions Mr Teixeira makes here. There is one really big one that he gets wrong, and that is the assumption that more is always better.
I am not convinced, frankly, that people actually always do want more. Based on the data, I’m fairly sure that’s not actually the case. The data consistently show, in fact (the linked CNBC story being only one example in a genre of œconomic studies that has been going on since the early 2010s), that up to a certain point, more material abundance does correlate with human happiness and satisfaction. Actually, that point is right around the average purchasing power parity in most modern Western developed nations, $75,000. However, past that point, having more material wealth doesn't actually make us happier even though we don’t stop trying to accumulate it. It’s the law of diminishing returns. With apologies to Daft Punk, there comes a point where harder better faster stronger just doesn’t get people off, and mo’ stuff actually begins to correlate with mo’ worries.
The irony is not lost on me that Teixeira is using the language of ‘sin’ here, because he is ignoring a critical dimension of the left’s failure to engage. The techno-enthusiasts and the growth-philes ignore these studies and these bodies of data at their own peril, because they are prescribing the wrong medicine – that of more material prosperity – for what is ultimately a hunger of the spirit. Saint John of Patmos put it correctly in his first Epistle: the problem with the ‘lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life’ is that it the stuff of the world that these desires want to find satiety in, is all ‘passing away, along with its desires’. Even though we cannot do without the material – Christ never condemned the material; He came in a material Body and by that Body gave us a material means of salvation – we look for more happiness in more material in vain. And we literally name as deadly passions – as sins – the sorts of behaviour Teixeira wants to encourage: lust, gluttony, avarice. Here is what the Russian Orthodox Church says about this:
The Church is not someone who defines the rights to property. However, the material side of human life is not outside her field of vision. While calling to seek first «the kingdom of God and his righteousness», the Church does not forget about people’s the need for «daily bread» and believes that every one should have resources sufficient for life in dignity. At the same time, the Church warns against the extreme attraction to wealth, denouncing those who are carried away by «cares and riches and pleasures of this life». The Church in her attitude to property does not ignore the material needs, nor does she praise the opposite extreme, the aspiration for wealth as the ultimate goal and value of life.
And still more emphatically:
Wealth cannot make man happy. The Lord Jesus Christ warns: «Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth». The pursuit of wealth makes a baneful impact on the spiritual condition of a person and can lead him to complete degradation. St. Paul points out that «they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. But thou, O man of God, flee these things».
And again, with regard to the human impact on œcology, here is what the Russian Church has to say. Note the relationship between material desire, technological progress, and spiritual loss:
Relationships between anthropology and ecology are revealed with utter clarity in our days when the world is experiencing two concurrent crises: spiritual and ecological. In contemporary society, man often loses the awareness of life as a gift of God and sometimes the very meaning of life, reducing it sometimes to the physical being alone. With this attitude to life, nature around him is no longer perceived as home and all the more so as temple, becoming only a «habitat». The spiritually degrading personality leads nature to degradation as well, for it is unable to make a transforming impact on the world. The colossal technological resources cannot help humanity blinded by sin, for, being indifferent to the meaning, mystery and wonder of life, they cannot be really beneficial and sometimes become even detrimental. In a spiritually disorientated man, the technological power would beget utopic reliance on the boundless resources of the human mind and the power of progress.
One of the first unambiguously-left politicians to have foreseen the problem of too much prosperity, and how this prosperity should be dealt with and distributed, was General Secretary Hu Jintao, when he made a suspiciously Confucian (specifically, the Odes) call for a xiaokang shehui 小康社会, or a ‘moderately prosperous society’. It’s been a practical goal of the Chinese left since 2002 to aim for a society where a certain basic standard of living is met but not exceeded; and Xi Jinping has included this aim specifically in his ‘Four Comprehensives’ policy. Note that Chinese policy has not been anti-growth per se, and certainly not anti-technology per se. But according to their own internal documents they are still only willing to pursue growth up to a certain point and are committed to a goal of ultimately tapering off.
So here is where I would say that Teixeira needs to reevaluate. He accuses the left of something like ingratitude when he comes to the topic of technology. I think that’s fair. The left does need to evince a certain degree of gratitude for the frontiers in medicine, sanitation, infrastructure, communications and so on that have been pushed by technological innovation. But the attitude of ‘I want more’ runs thoroughly counter to this position of gratitude. Indeed, what happens when the ‘more’ that people want is inevitably unable to be satisfied by greater material wealth? If ‘more is better’, and ‘more’ even beyond the point of satiety – or even to the point of satiety – is all that the left really wants, then Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were completely right to reject it. And American voters will be right to reject it.
~~~
Coming to the second article, on the sins of American right, by Henry Olson… this article strikes me as a trifle strange on account of its fixation on the figure of Reagan. More on that later, though. The fact that Olson is straight-up willing to criticise these streaks in the Republican Party – not just the market fundamentalism but also white Protestant snobbery and the tendency to idolise the businessman and the pious patriarch – is truly laudable. What’s more, I don’t really dispute Olson’s diagnoses, though it must be admitted that I approach this topic more from a grounding in the American left than in the American right, and thus have a predisposition to affirm these critiques. Even so, there is a certain Whiggish anthropological falsity even under these needed and praiseworthy correctives, that needs to be addressed – and so I feel I have to play Devil’s advocate here as well.
Market fundamentalism is indeed a sin, and it is indeed a sin of the Republican Party in general going back to the 1980s. (It’s an intriguing bit of sleight-of-hand Olson uses to elide the fact that Reagan himself did much to foment and popularise within the Republican Party at least the first of these three cardinal partizan sins he discusses, despite a couple of protectionist flourishes Reagan made in his second term.) The Russian people know about market fundamentalism, having had a direct experience with the ‘shock doctrine’ between 1992 and 1998. So it should come as no surprise that the Orthodox Church likewise censures, first, the absolute commitment to private property among people:
According to the teaching of the Church, people receive all the earthly blessings from God who is the One who holds the absolute right to possess them. The Saviour repeatedly points to the relative nature of the right to property in His parables on a vineyard let out to be used, on talents distributed among many and on an estate handed over for temporary management. Expressing the idea inherent to the Church that God is the absolute owner of everything, St. Basil the Great asks: «Tell me, what do you have that is yours? Where from did you take it and bring to life?» The sinful attitude to property manifested in the conscious rejection of this spiritual principle generates division and alienation among people.
And second, that the Russian Orthodox Church condemns the idea that ‘market relations’ should be the sole or even primary consideration in the distribution of goods like healthcare:
Without giving preference to any organisational model of medical aid, the Church believes that this aid should be maximum effective and accessible to all members of society, regardless of their financial means and social status, also in the situation of limited medical resources. To make the distribution of these resources truly equitable, the criterion of «vital needs» should prevail over that of «market relations».
I likewise agree with Olson that snobbery and hubris – these two appear to be synonymous with the passions of vainglory and pride – are common failings on the political right, though they are far from exclusive to the right. Olson seems to be angling after a particular anthropology or genealogy of the American right, with his observations of these sins: a genealogy which is rooted in its class origins and in its religious origins. I’m a trifle uncomfortable with this genealogical account of conservative sins for, I guess we can call them ‘Quakerdox’ reasons (and, yes, I’m aware of the irony), but fine, we may take it as read.
Olson accuses the Republicans of entertaining, too often, a kind of white and Protestant intégrisme, which elevates the (private, devotional, pietistic) religious concerns of the holders of power over considerations of policy – that theological failings are tantamount to political failings. I kind of get this complaint, and I share it. But he’s treading out on some very thin anthropological ice. The common roots of sæcular law and religious law are more deeply entangled than he wants to permit, and the common roots of morality and religious devotion as well:
Historically, both religious and secular laws originate from the same source. Moreover, for a long time they only represented two sides of one legal field. This idea of law is also characteristic of the Old Testament.
The Lord Jesus Christ, in calling those faithful to Him to the Kingdom that is not of this world, separated the Church as His body from the world lying in evil. In Christianity, the internal law of the Church is free from the spiritually-fallen state of the world and is even opposed to it. This opposition, however, is not the violation but the fulfilment of the law of the divine Truth in its fullness, which humanity repudiated in the fall. Comparing the Old Testament norms with that of the Gospel, the Lord in His Sermon on the Mount calls people to seek the full identity of life with the absolute divine law, that is to deification: «Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect».
At the same time, though, the law is written upon all human hearts; the law is made for all and all are bound to it, regardless of what religious beliefs they hold. There is a certain basic level of human dignity which cannot be reduced to mere religious belonging. Again, the Russian Orthodox Church on the subject:
Among the oldest monuments of the written language are numerous collections of homilies and statutes. Undoubtedly, they go back to the even earlier, pre-alphabet, existence of humanity, since «the work of the law» is written by God in human hearts. Law has been there in the human society from times immemorial. The first rules were given to man as far back as the paradise time. After the fall, which is violation by man of the divine law, law becomes a boundary and trespassing against it threatens the destruction of both the human personality and human community.
The law contains a certain minimum of moral standards compulsory for all members of society. The secular law has as its task not to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but to prevent it from turning into hell. The fundamental principle of law is: «do not do to others what you would not want to be done to yourself».
So I would go along with Olson happily, as long as what he is critiquing is a certain vainglorious image of homo conservativus, a certain false idol of the self which American conservatives are sometimes wont to lug around with them: an idol of the self in which sentimentality and private devotion (or worse yet, self-interest masquerading as piety!) substitute themselves for actual works of mercy. Merely going through the performative motions of religiosity is no substitute whatsoever for actual works of kindness and justice, true mortification of the will, true acts of courage. He and I can agree all day long on that count. As Khomyakov put it:
He who loved truth and righteousness and defended the weak against the strong, who fought against corruption, tortures and slavery, is a Christian, if only to some extent; he who did his best to improve the life of the workers and to brighten the wretched lot of the classes oppressed by poverty whom we cannot as yet make quite happy, is a Christian, if only in part.
But Olson only partially frees himself from the objections to such idolatry, because of the abject and even idolatrous hero-worship of Ronald Reagan which suffuses his article. Olson engages in the sæcular canonisation of a figure who (again, despite some protectionist flourishes he made as California governor and in his second term as president) possibly did more than any other to retrench the ideas of market fundamentalism on the American right, in a way that had not held sway since Calvin Coolidge. In an article which is meant to explore the sins of the American right, such an emphasis – at best – lacks good taste. At worst, it seems to be an admission of cluelessness with regard to how the American right arrived in its current plight.
Again, I don’t want to come down too hard on either of these authors. In many ways, they are doing better than I am: they are engaged in the hard and necessary work of metanoia on behalf of their respective political communities; and allowances are certainly to be made for excesses of overcorrection, or for lacunæ in the rearward view so dearly held. And I’m sure that there are such lacunæ and such overcorrections in my own idiosyncratic syncretic political views, which are themselves grown out of the crooked timber of sexual fantasies and utopian dreaming, which I have yet to address. I applaud the bravery of these two authors for the conversation they have begun.
EDIT: I cannot believe I posted something about the deadly sins without also referencing Maiden’s Seventh Son album. Bad hesher! Bad! Ahem. At any rate, here to make up for it is ‘Can I Play with Madness’:
I want to help build landscapes that leave heart-warming memories… I didn’t even know anybody in that town. Why does the scenery of a town that no longer exists wring my heart so?
Back when I did my review of Flavours of Youth I promised I’d get around to seeing this film: Your Name, directed by Shinkai Makoto 新海诚. In short, I’m incredibly glad I did. This film is a masterpiece, one which well deserves its reputation as a classic of Japanese animation.
Your Name is best described as a fantasy/sci-fi romance, which speaks directly to a Japanese but also a more broadly East Asian experience of being disconnected in time, of the tensions and antinomies that arise from being part of a landscape where ageless antiquity and glittering hyper-modernity exist side-by-side. But the two main characters, despite their frequent and sometimes heartbreaking alienation which sometimes takes the form of literal jumps in time, still seek a genuine connexion with each other. And the heart of the film rests in how they mature and grow.
Your Name is a story that defies easy categorisation. It’s a story about a (literal) disaster, when a comet strikes a remote, traditional Japanese town. It’s also a bildungsroman and a breathtakingly bittersweet teen romance. It freely borrows from SFnal tropes about time-travel (including multiple timelines and alternate futures), as well as fantasy tropes about body-swapping (think the Warehouse 13 episode ‘Merge with Caution’). It is steeped in traditional Chinese lore, Daoism and Shintô religious rites, but it also has the feel of a young-adult fantasy book by TA Barron. It would be easy for any feature film, but particularly a Japanese animated one, with this many moving parts to feel overstuffed, overwrought and pretentious. But Your Name avoids this in part because of the tender vulnerability and humanity of the two protagonists.
Your Name uses a lot of traditional tropes from East Asian literature that might get lost on American audiences. The ‘red thread of fate’ is probably a familiar enough one, and it gets used liberally here between the two protagonists. The ‘butterfly dream’ of Zhuangzi is also alluded to. The tradition of fermenting rice wine with human saliva (kuchikamizake 口嚼酒) plays an important rôle in the story. And despite all the fractures and disconnects in time that occur between the two protagonists, there is a subtle but persistent theme of continuity, of history repeating itself, of déjà vu.
A comet, whose orbit comes within sight of Earth once every 1200 years, passes overhead. As it enters Earth’s gravity well, its nucleus fractures, producing a spectacular meteor shower. One of these fragments is large enough to fall on the village of Itomori. It destroys the town and kills 500 of its inhabitants. Two young teenagers look up at the night sky and watch the comet streak across. One of them, Tachibana Taki 立花泷 is a high-schooler and part-time waiter in a fancy restaurant in Shinjuku ward in Tôkyô. The other, Miyamizu Mitsuha 宫水三叶, is a high schooler in Itomori, and one of the two granddaughters of the keeper of the local Shintô shrine there.
Mitsuha is frustrated with her limited surroundings, being (embarrassingly) involved in the rites of the shrine, getting unwanted attention from being the village mayor’s daughter, and feeling like she’s trapped in a fishbowl. She screams from underneath the torii that she hates her life, she hates her town, and she wishes she could be reincarnated as a handsome boy in Tôkyô. Not long after this, Mitsuha and Taki begin to have strange dreams.
Formerly, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about, feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Zhou. Suddenly I awoke, and was myself again, the veritable Zhou. I did not know whether it had formerly been Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. But between Zhou and a butterfly there must be a difference.
As though in answer to Mitsuha’s wish, Mitsuha and Taki begin swapping bodies, randomly, whenever they fall asleep. This part of the story might have been handled gratuitously or exploitatively, and sometimes it rides the line. (What’s the first thing Pete does when Robert Louis Stevenson’s bookends trap him in Myka’s body? Yup, Taki does the same thing. Typical teenage boy.) But Taki and Mitsuha are quickly intrigued by each other in deeper ways. Mitsuha finally gets to visit Tôkyô, go out to eat in stylish urban cafés, and hold down a job in a fancy restaurant. And Taki is enchanted by the charming architecture and wondrous vistas of Itomori – including the huge round lake which is very clearly and ominously a crater.
The two teenagers quickly begin setting ground rules for each other, what they are and aren’t allowed to do in each other’s bodies, leaving each other messages including by writing on each other’s hands and wrists with marker. Going through each other’s smartphones, they learn details about each other’s lives that they can appreciate. Taki begins asserting himself among Mitsuha’s classmates to get them to stop teasing her. And Mitsuha sets Taki up with an older girl at his workplace, Okudera, whom he has a crush on, and tells him in a message that he should be able to see the comet that night.
Taki’s date with Okudera goes poorly and no comet appears. He tries calling Mitsuha with the number she left him, and she doesn’t answer. The body-switching stops, but Taki can’t forget about the dreams he had from when he was Mitsuha. He then embarks, together with Okudera and his classmate Tsukasa, on a half-baked quest to find Mitsuha and her village. The only thing he has to go on, though, since he can’t remember her name or the name of the village, are the landscape drawings and sketches he did of the views from her house and the temple. An old man recognises his sketch as that of Itomori before the disaster, and Taki ultimately learns from him that Mitsuha was killed along with the rest of the village when the comet struck Itomori three years before.
Taki decides to leave Okudera and Tsukasa to try and find the holy place where Mitsuha’s grandmother took her to pay respects to the old Shintô god that had come 1200 years ago. It happens to be in the middle of a crater – and Mitsuha’s grandmother had told her that crossing over into the grounds of the shrine was like taking a step into the underworld. Taki finds the rice wine that Mitsuha made inside the shrine, and drinks it. This reconnects Mitsuha and Taki, and allows the two of them to rewrite the history of Itomori and save the townspeople from the impact of the comet fragment. But, as history changes, the dream ends, and the two of them lose each other again, even forgetting each other’s names…
I’m not going to spoil the ending here, but suffice it to say this: Shinkai Makoto has a brilliant and touching ‘ear’ for the voices of young adults. He makes real the connexion between these two people, so utterly different from one another and separated by time, space, class, sex, tradition and modernity. Although the director very cautiously refrains from overtly editorialising at any point in the film – with one partial exception – one gets the distinct impression that the same longing the characters feel for each other is connected intimately to a sense of loss of the traditions that Mitsuha embodies in her life even as she rebels against them.
One sees this same sort of traditionalism, actually, even in the gender-bending body-swap plot. Even though it’s a explicitly a comic point to see ‘Taki’ (inhabited by Mitsuha’s consciousness) act like a traditional-minded Japanese girl, and ‘Mitsuha’ (actually Taki) behave live a typical urban high-school boy – right down to their body language and pronouns (‘Taki’ almost gives the game away by calling himself by the feminine ‘watashi 私’ before landing on the more masculine ‘ore 俺’) – they each come to have a tender respect for each other’s physical embodiedness and an active interest in each other’s social lives. There is an almost Ruist sensibility here, in that Taki and Mitsuha come to understand and love each other by experiencing relationships with friends, family and surroundings through each other’s eyes.
The single most strained relationship in the film, actually, is that between Mitsuha and her father, who is a (presumably ruling-party) politician in the town, and who rather callously left his daughters behind with his shrine-keeping mother-in-law after their mother died. Throughout the film Mitsuha’s father refuses to listen to her or take her seriously. This is where I think the partial exception to Shinkai’s refusal to editorialise comes in. Mitsuha’s father represents a deliberate rupture with tradition even though he uses it to attain his personal goals.
As to be expected from a CoMix Wave production, the animation quality is amazing, even if – by Shinkai Makoto’s own admission – not quite reaching the Studio Ghibli gold standard. Both the urban and the rural backdrops are lovingly, painstakingly rendered – as though each frame is meant to be a landscape painting. The technical and stylistic use of proportion and perspective, also, enhance the thematic preoccupations with separation and reunion, rupture and continuity, alienation and connexion. I highly, highly recommend this film.
EDIT: Also, the title of the film called to mind this Tad Morose song, the lyrics to which seem almost appropriate at times:
The ninth of November is the feast-day of a pre-Schismatic Western saint of Britain, Saint Pabo, who was king of the Pennines in northern Britain. He converted to Christianity in his adulthood and, as seems to have been a trend among the British kings, he retired from his throne in favour of a hermitage in his old age.
Pabo was the son of Cenau, the son of Coel Hen. As a ruler, he was a fierce warden of his land and – at first – a stout believer in the old Celtic trow. His cognomen, ‘Post Prydain’ or ‘Pillar of Britain’, indicates that he had achieved renown as a successful defender of the Romano-British North – Yr Hen Ogledd – against the invading Picts and Scots. He was the father of the proud princelings Dynod Bwr and Sawyl Ben Uchel, and by them respectively, the grandfather of Saints Deiniol of Bangor and Asa of Tegeingl.
Pabo converted to Christianity late in his life, and that conversion appears to have had a significant impact on his life. He bequeathed his inheritance yet living upon his sons, who split the kingdom between them in the traditional legal custom of cyfran, or gavelkind – and so ‘died to the world’. He took up the wandering life and made his way south and west through the kingdom of Gwynedd to Ynys Môn (or Anglesey), where he founded a hermit’s cell for himself at Llanbabo, which became the Church of Saint Pabo. It was there that he reposed in the Lord on the ninth of November, 530 – obscure in the eyes of the world but glorious in the eyes of Christ.
Holy and righteous Pabo, king and confessor, pray to Christ our God for us sinners!
Today in the Holy Orthodox Church we commemorate the Holy and Right-believing Ælfrǽd the Great, King of Wessex, better known by his modernised name Alfred. Saint Ælfrǽd was truly a pivotal figure, not only in English but in Christian and indeed world history. Of course there were other sainted princes and potentates before him – indeed, plenty of them and perhaps a few too many – and of course there were copious other princes and potentates who truly desired and endeavoured to rule justly. But Ælfrǽd was the first of the ‘barbarian kings’ to truly succeed in uniting the Christian radicalism born of the Benedictine witness to the demands of sacral statecraft. Before Queen Tamara, before Prince Vladimir, and even before Duke Václav – there stood Ælfrǽd. ‘Elf-counsel’, to wit his name, and indeed from his life we can see that his decision-making and his policies were truly fortunate – blessed not by elves but by God.
Ælfrǽd’s quality was not merely shown in war, though his spirited defence of England which stopped the marauding heathen Danes dead in their tracks is certainly worthy of mention, as is his establishment of a reserve force and coast guard to assist in this defence. It was also shown in his passionate love for the education of his people both in the classical mode and in their own vernacular. For him it was not enough merely to have a small, privileged and clerical literate caste as the servitors and interpreters of the nobility both sæcular and ecclesiastical – no. He wanted to inculcate learning among the laity, and not only to high-born sons, through his ‘court school’. And he promoted the bejeezus out of it, not least by wading into the field of scholarly work and popular education himself. He translated Pope Saint Gregory Dialogos’s Pastoral Care, Boëthius’s Consolations of Philosophy and Saint Bede’sHistory of the English Church and People into, well, English, and also authored his own works on theology, history and gæography in Latin. He commissioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He even sent shipmen as far afield as Estonia and the White Sea in order to map the coastlines.
Ælfrǽd also personally promoted a codified system of law which was in itself a remarkably ambitious attempt to harmonise the legal customs of the English handed down from Teutonic heathen antiquity, with the Laws of Moses. Legally speaking, he was not only a progressive but downright radical. He forbade private feuds: no small step in an honour culture such the one as he lived in. He took the power of high justice out of the uneven hands of the landlords and placed it in judges who were to deliver impartial judgements in the King’s name and in God’s. He expressly forbade his judges from issuing harsh judgements to the poor while delivering slaps on the wrists of the rich.
Speaking of which, Ælfrǽd also drastically expanded the money supply and instituted a progressive tax code similar to (and possibly inspired by) that of Emperor Constantine. It was based on the productivity and extent of ‘hides’ or landholdings: rich landowners paid proportionally more and contributed more men to the common defence; while poor landowners and smallholders owed proportionally less. And of the revenues he collected from it, one eighth would be directly earmarked what we would consider to be ‘social welfare’: directly given to beggars, hospitals, wayhouses and other sick and needy people. He also made it illegal to make anyone work on Sundays and holidays. Ælfrǽd was committed to a strongly social vision of the common good, not only educationally but œconomically.
In addition to this, he poured massive amounts of energy, time and resources into the building of public works: fortifications of towns or burgs; repairs to cities and roads ruined by Danish pillage; renovations of old and foundations of new churches and monasteries. This energetic promotion of learning and law, welfare and works; this relentless pursuit of a common good – this did not proceed solely from the mind and heart of a man, but it sprang from one enlightened by a sincere and single-minded desire to serve Christ Jesus. Ælfrǽd spent much of his day in prayer and in the reading of the Psalms. He desired to attend – and often did, behind the backs of his þegnas – all the hours that the Benedictines kept, and even fretted that he was oft prevented from doing so by the seasonal and meteorological variability of England’s sunlight!
It is also worth remembering that Ælfrǽd was the youngest son of his father Æþelwulf and mother Ósburg, the youngest indeed of five brothers – a slightly-built boy, and at that one who was often ill with a fearsome and then-unknown ailment (nowadays thought to be Crohn’s disease). It is said his parents brought him to Ireland, seeking healing for him from that nation’s many holy wells and saintly shrines. His mind, though, was active and hungry – according to Bishop Asser, he won from his mother a book of English poems that she offered to the first of her children who could commit it to memory.
Saint Ælfrǽd accompanied his father on pilgrimage to Rome when he was but six years old, and may have met Pope Leo IV there. His father, however, died when he was only nine years old, leaving the kingdom of Wessex to his elder brothers. It was only when Ælfrǽd’s third brother, Æþelræd, ascended the throne, that he began to show his skill – and even then, he was hard-pressed. The West Saxons lost battle after battle to the Great Heathen Here, and in those dark days it looked as though the flickering candle of English independence and Christianity was to be snuffed out forever. But the tenacity of Ælfrǽd and his ability to somehow retain and direct the loyalty of his men under such circumstances changed the tide. He managed to win an engagement against an evenly-manned force of Danes in the Berkshire Downs despite having to fight uphill. However, the losses for the West Saxons kept mounting – including Æþelræd himself, who took a blow which may have killed him at the battle of Marton in April 871.
The kingdom of Wessex, and the fate of England, thus fell upon the slight, sickly shoulders of a twenty-one-year-old Ælfrǽd. After another string of defeats Ælfrǽd was essentially forced to buy the Danes off, in an attempt to buy time for Wessex to lick her own wounds and recover. The Danes did not keep their word and, under a new king named Guðrum, kept on attacking the West Saxons, killing and raping as they went. Ælfrǽd was kept alive through his repeated and seemingly-hopeless engagements through what appears to be the grace of God – and the intercessions of Saint Cuðberht, to whom Ælfrǽd was deeply devoted – combined with sheer cussed stubbornness. He wound up at the head of a hardscrabble, ragtag band that hid out in the scrubby marshlands at Athelney and all that spring mounted hit-and-run asymmetrical attacks and supply raids on the occupying Danes. They won enough help from the lowly folk of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire through the levy at Ecgbryht’s Stone, that they were ultimately able to make a stand at Edington. Unaided by any outside help save that of Christ, they faced the Great Heathen Here which had terrorised and murdered its way across Great Britain for the past decade and more.
Here the English David proved his mettle against the Danish Goliath, for the battle of Edington was a rout for Guðrum and his Danes. The West Saxons formed ‘a dense shield-wall’ and refused to budge; the way that warfare was waged in those days, because the Northmen could not sustain their momentum by breaking through the shield-wall or forcing the West Saxons to give ground, they quickly tired and were beaten back. Ælfrǽd lay siege to the Danish fortress at Chippenham and forced their surrender by starving them out. The Danes promised to withdraw and leave Ælfrǽd’s territory, but significantly Ælfrǽd extracted another concession: the baptism of Guðrum, with Ælfrǽd himself standing as his sponsor.
Ælfrǽd did not merely trust in this baptism to keep the Danes at bay forever, though. He called up his reserve force on a permanent defensive footing, and began his project of constructing fortified towns. He also quickly made a series of politically-astute alliances. He found a high-born Mercian girl, Ealhswíþ (later a saint in her own right), and married her – the better to cement a much-needed alliance between Wessex and Mercia against the Danes. He also spoke frith with the Welsh to his west and the Frisians and Flemings on the Continent – these latter proved helpful to him in building ships which he used to maintain a coast guard against Danish raids from the sea.
Ælfrǽd’s political and educational reforms mentioned above sprang, it seems, both from pragmatic concerns about defence and from a sincere desire to serve God. However, they had the salutary effects of bolstering West Saxon resolve; strengthening and consolidating West Saxon political and military institutions; reinvigorating learning; and rebuilding trust among the common English folk, without whose help Edington and England would have been lost. It’s impossible to overstate how effective he was: at the beginning of Ælfrǽd’s reign Wessex was a beaten, occupied territory; but by the end, it was the undisputed nucleus of a great late flourishing of spiritual, cultural, intellectual and œconomic life in England. He is one of only two kings in England ever to receive the cognomen ‘the Great’, and that is fully deserved – not only on account of his successes in war but also on account of his ability to actively build the common good during peacetime. Holy and right-believing Ælfrǽd, learned prince and protector of the West Saxon lands, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!
Hearkening to the White Christ,
Thou camest forth from thy flood-girt fastness
To overcome the heathen and lead them forth to holy baptism.
Thou didst build churches, strongholds, shires and swift ships,
Restoring the law of God and making thyself beloved of all.
O wise King and glory of free England,
Who reignest in the Winchester of the heavenly England,
Thou who didst vanquish heathendom by Christendom,
Establish anew the Orthodox Faith in thy land
That we may glorify God, Who alone made thee great!
Ruslan (Murat Bisembin) and Saıan (Saıat Isembaev) in Réketir
Last month before leaving for Tulsa, I watched the Aqan Sataev film Jaýjúrek myń bala, the dastanic national epic written for the twentieth anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence, centred on the life and exploits of the orphaned Sartaı. Sataev’s later piece is a tribute to Kazakhstan’s now ex-President Nursultan Nazarbaev, who – the end of the movie states explicitly – finished the grand historical task for which Abylaı Khan and Sartaı and other Kazakh heroes had fought for centuries. This was not, however, the film that made Sataev (and his studio, SataiFilm) famous. One of Sataev’s first movies was a neo-noir crime film: Réketır (that is, Racketeer), which was far less laudatory and far less heroic – but which was hailed on its release as a true reflection of a certain era in post-Soviet history.
I do have to wonder a bit if Aqan Sataev and Sergei Bodrov don’t have something of a friendly rivalry going on: the films they produce and direct are often very similar to each other. This film, for example, bears a number of surface-level resemblances to Guka Omarova’s Shıza (Schizo): both movies are about a youngster’s ‘descent’ into, and possible redemption from, a violent life of organised crime. Both movies were produced on a shoestring budget with drama-school casting. They share a number of thematic elements as well. Both Shıza and Réketır are, at bottom, commentaries not only on organised crime but on the entire capitalist ethos of the post-Soviet 1990s – with its shock therapy, individualism, materialism, alcoholism, violence, naked greed and (often literal) backstabbing.
But Mustafa’s understated revolt in Shıza against the norms of his time – his selflessness; his sense of fair play; his familial loyalty and particularly his love for Zinaida and Sanjik – keeps him somewhat aloof and preserved from the base grasping and thievery going on all around him in a greedy and materialistic society which inevitably sees him as stupid or crazy. By contrast, Sataev wants us to inhabit and sympathise with the mentality of a ‘normal’ person in this society. Saıan (Saıat Isembaev) is the main character as well as the narrator – his Mike Hammer voice-over often providing us with interior monologue and other context. A below-average student in school – much to the disappointment of his mother in particular – he enlists in the Soviet Army and comes out with a scholarship and a job as a courier. The one thing Saıan is good at – even though in his youth he didn’t enjoy it – is boxing. However, we see from flat shots of his parents watching Gorbachev on an old black-and-white TV that the times are changing.
Saıan’s father is fired from his state-provided job, and falls into depression and drink. His mother takes to selling things on the street. Saıan’s high school girlfriend Asel (Asel Sagatova) leaves him for a richer man. One day in 1993 after a boxing match, a man named Ruslan (Murat Bisembin) approaches Saıan with an offer of a steady job – which, unsurprisingly, Saıan doesn’t turn down. Ruslan, it turns out, runs his own local extortion ring, and is hiring Saıan to be one of his ‘boys’, that he sends to shake down (and ‘protect’, if they’re compliant) local businessmen like the bartender Abu (Bolat Qalymbetov): breaking a nose or a leg or an arm if need be. Saıan then introduces us to his partners in the business – most notably Aman, who murders one of Ruslan’s rivals and does ten years in prison as a result, only to seek solace in the Qur’an while in prison. One of Saıan’s ‘brothers’, a petty crook who cheats passersby with a shell game (played by Tolepbergen Baısakalov, who landed a supporting rôle in Tulpan about the same time), boasts that he just got back from America on his bike just before a couple of Russians, whom he presumably conned earlier, demand their money back from him. They get into a fight with Saıan and Ruslan’s other ‘boys’, who leave them all out cold and bloodied. However, these Russians are connected to the police, who arrest them all.
Ruslan’s gang doesn’t just dabble in such petty crimes, though – they also muscle their way in on bigger business. They manage to earn their keep ‘protecting’ an up-and-coming businessman, with Western fashion sense in the new nineties mould, named Jan (Janat Baıjanbaev), who is currently aiming to start in on a big industrial venture with the help of partners from Moscow. Ruslan is promised a cut of all his future business. For a while, things start looking up for Saıan – his parents are no longer in as desperate a situation, though neither of them are happy with the shady business he’s gotten into. He also runs into Asel again, who is divorced. Now that Saıan is doing better for himself, she wants to rekindle their relationship, and invites him over to her house for ‘a cup of tea’. Things start to go south, however, when Jan runs into financial problems – and brings in another ‘business partner’ with more money and more muscle than Ruslan & Company have.
The film alternates, sometimes startlingly, between treating its story with scowling seriousness and with a certain satirical, comedic eye. Sataev seems to have a preference for these flat shots of the businessmen Ruslan and his crew shake down, as they make obsequious gestures to the ‘boys’, that are clearly meant to draw laughs. The relationship between Saıan and Asel has none of the same charm as the parallel relationship between Mustafa and Zinka in Shıza; Zinka clearly cares about the money Mustafa brings her, but only insofar as she’s a foster mother who has to make rent somehow – Asel just comes across as mercenary. This unfortunately causes the one scene in which Saıan shows true, unguarded grief – when Asel miscarries in the maternity ward – to fall slightly flat. For the most part, however, we come to sympathise with Saıan, whose normalcy, despite his indisputable criminality, can sometimes disarm us. When he is suddenly and unexpectedly thrust into the position of gang leader for the first time, we can sense his indecision, and we know that despite his willingness to use his fists, he simply doesn’t have that streak of sadism and ruthless vindictiveness he needs to be ‘successful’ from the perspective of his own enterprise. Despite being somewhat alienated from his old friends in the army and from college, really he’s still just that college kid who got in way over his head.
It was clear to me from Sataev’s Jaýjúrek myń bala that he has some deeply-held Islamic convictions, and they do show up quite strongly in this movie also. But here the Islamic voice does not serve any nationalistic or triumphalist purpose. Sataev’s Islam is much more that of the Sûfî poets: he is looking for a specific kind of repentance. The voice of conscience in the film is Aman, the hit-man from the first act who went to prison for putting one of Ruslan’s rivals out of action. As Aman drives Saıan to a mosque to pray, he begins talking about what he learned in his time in prison, how he learned to put away old grudges and live his life with a sense of contentment rather than greed. For Aman, if God judges everybody at the end, and if His judgements are not our judgements, then we have only our own acts and our own injustices to be responsible for, and have no need to seek revenge. Aman says that there is a bowl hanging over every man’s head containing all the injustices he does, and if it overflows, the evil will pour out upon him. It seems that for Sataev, as well as for the Russians who struggled with these issues at the same time, the ‘way out’ from the cruel, cutthroat materialism of the 1990s lay in a return to God – the ‘long walk to mosque’, if I may appropriate and slightly abuse the Orthodox phrase. Saıan never quite finishes that walk, though, despite Aman driving him right up to the door – and he is left with that bowl of his own evil poured out upon him.
As crime movies go, Réketır, despite its few dabbles into possibly comedic or satirical territory with regard to its subject matter, still comes across as effective. It moves at a quick clip. It strikes just the right note of gangster bravado: letting us see the big Western luxury cars, the Rémy Martin cognac, the discos and the dinner parties that were the putative earthly reward for the spent casings and bloody knuckles, without rubbing them in our faces, romanticising or glorifying them. The violence itself is likewise gritty and understated, not cartoonish. And the religious themes – particularly as they relate to the gangster code of retribution – here seem to mirror those in, for example, a Martin Scorsese movie a bit more so than the Russian crime films from the same period.
EDIT: I know where that song from the scene with the Moscow big-shot came from! That’s ‘Kokil’ from the album Jumyr-Kylysh by the Kazakh folk-metal band Ulytau!
Today on the Orthodox New Calendar we commemorate a continental Saxon saint, Bernward, the bishop of Hildesheim; and an insular Saxon one, Éadmund King of East Anglia.
Born to Saxon eldern – Bishop Saint Bernward’s grandfather Adalbero was a comes palatinus of Sachsen from the Hessengau – he was orphaned early in life and was given into the care of his uncle Bishop Folkmar, who held the Bishopric of Utrecht founded by Saint Willibrord three hundred years before. Folkmar entrusted his education to a schoolmaster in Heidelberg named Dankmar, who saw to it that he was given thorough learning in letters and arts.
Young Bernward, however, was more interested in what we would now call the STEM subjects: the natural sciences, mathematics and the crafts – and in particular the smelting, forging and casting of metal. He was particularly drawn to the art of working precious metals into things of beauty for liturgical use: chalices, censers, crosses. After that, he completed his studies in Mainz and was ordained to the priesthood by Saint Willigis of Mainz. He was a favourite of the Byzantine Greek princess and Imperial consort Theofanō, and was made in quick succession a High Chaplain at the court at Nimwegen and subsequently a tutor to her young son, the future Otto III.
Saint Bernward served as a priest in Hildesheim for some while; his charge was not only to educate the future Emperor but also to strengthen the Saxon people in the Christian faith – they had been baptised, and none too agreeably, only 200 years before. Bernward took to this work – caring for the poor and the sick, and often literally building new walls and edifices: often defensive emplacements to ward against the Slavs who lived to the east of Saxony, but also against the piratical Normans who attacked the continental Saxons as eagerly as they would later attack the insular ones. When his young charge came of age and became Emperor in his own right, Bernward was quickly anointed as a bishop; and he accompanied the Emperor on many of his campaigns.
Saint Bernward loved to work with his hands, and loved the crafts that came from them; though not a poor tektōn by birth as Our Lord was, he was nevertheless a tektōn at heart, by preference. He founded a number of workshops and guilds in Hildesheim, through which the town became under his direction a great cultural hub for sculpture, painting, architecture, metalwork and bookbinding. A Benedictine by sympathy, he laid the cornerstone of what would become the Benedictine Monastery of Saint Michael, and also commissioned the famous Bernwardtür on the Cathedral of Saint Mary in Hildesheim, which feature a series of parallel wrought images of the Fall of Man in Adam and the Redemption of Man in Christ.
He joined the Benedictines himself, and met his blessed repose shortly after blessing the Monastery of Saint Michael. A great pre-Schismatic patron of the arts, Saint Bernward is today commemorated in both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, and he is considered in the Roman Catholic Church to be a patron of metalworkers. (As a machinist myself, I shall be sure to ask a few prayers to Christ our God from Saint Bernward of Hildesheim for good work and machines running true.)
20 November is also the feast-day of Éadmund, king of East Anglia and martyr of the Viking invasion of 869. Very little is known about the short reign of this young English king, or about his early life, to the point where his historicity is mostly witnessed by the coins minted under his reign. It is known that he acceded to the throne at the age of fourteen. Hagiographical accounts give Éadmund the cast of a righteous Germanic chieftain – trustworthy, even-handed, mistrustful of flattery – as well as of an observant Christian who could say the Psalter from memory.
It is also known that he was killed by the Danes when the Great Heathen Army landed on the English coast in 869, but Éadmund’s hagiographers are unclear about how. One source says that he faced them with his army and was slain in battle; another has it that he gave himself up without violence (as would the later Boris and Gleb in Rus’). A popular account given by Abbo of Fleury has it that the Danes captured him and brought him to Hoxne, where they beat him and bound him to the bole of a tree. When he cried aloud to Christ for strength, the Danes shot arrows into him and at last beheaded him. He was buried in a stead that thereafter became known as Bury St Edmunds, and a cultus quickly sprang up around his miraculous relics – but the shrine was sadly destroyed in the English Reformation. For a long while, he was the patron saint of all of England, though he was later replaced by Saint George.
Holy Hierarch Bernward and Holy Éadmund Martyr-King, pray to God for us!
Huh. The mayor of Sevastopol is now a Pink Floyd fan. Go figure. Of course, former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev is a fan of Deep Purple, so perhaps that shouldn’t be so surprising.
Life as an expat can be very difficult, and it shapes you in ways that you would not have imagined beforehand. My wife and I have both lived as expats. There is a kind of ‘weightlessness’ with it, which is spoken of by Mother Maria of Paris, whose memory we celebrate today alongside her fellow new martyrs Saints Il’ya (Fondaminsky), Dimitri (Klepinin) and Yuri (Skobtsov). The expat is cut loose from the bonds that tether him: the exhortations of his elders, the expectations of his peers. The new society which surrounds him has not lain hold of him yet. Mother Maria perceived this perfectly when she said that losing one’s homeland is something akin to losing one’s body – though in her case, the trauma was doubled by the fact that her expat displacement was political and involuntary.
When you’re an expat, after that initial glow of the ‘honeymoon stage’ of living in a wondrous new place wears off, you begin to draw close to ‘your own’. You seek out people who are like you, who speak the same language, who share the same outlook. In both cities I lived in, Baotou and Luoyang, my closest friends were young Englishmen with an interest in video games: we bonded over Europa Universalis 3 and Super Smash Bros. If you’re not careful, the weightlessness becomes that of a fragile but impermeable soap-bubble, and you can develop all manner of bad habits and vices. But if you keep your experience permeable, there is also an opportunity for a ‘double witness’ in the expat life. (I’m afraid I’ve only become semi-good at one of the directions of that witness – and vices, I developed too many.)
Another saint with an icon at Saint Herman’s which, like Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco’s, I had often venerated without knowing precisely why I do it, is that of Patriarch Saint Tikhon of Moscow. Like with Saint John, I’ve been mesmerised by his face. Examine the icon of Saint Tikhon. His white brows and intense eyes, although they have a fierce, almost burning kindness, nonetheless express themselves with a certain kind of sadness, a look of what the elder Britons would call hiraeth. It’s a look I’ve seen often in the faces of expats. Before I read his letters, before I knew his story, I venerated him simply because it seemed he knew what it was to be weightless.
Of course, knowing his story as I do now, it seems somewhat that that hiraeth would have been for the loss of the Russia he knew to the ideological war zone that took its place after 1917, and not perhaps so much that from his time in the Americas. He became, not merely an expat, but an exile within his own nation. But it doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to think on what it would have been to him, to serve as the archpastor among a people so alien to him as we Americans are. The Orthodox of the Americas were, even in his day, a motley crew, a mishmash of poor immigrants from around the globe. (It seems I can’t help myself, making these hard rock and heavy metal references with regard to the history of our church. Of course Tommy Lee is a Greek; but that’s an excuse, not an explanation.)
Bishop Tikhon – suddenly servant not only to Russian-Americans but also to Rusins, South Slavs, Syrians, Inuits and Aleuts – could very well have retreated to his bubble, and kept to his bishop’s office in Alaska or New York. But he didn’t. The weightlessness of being an expat led him instead to a new intensity of witness, and he spent much of his American sojourn in travel. In his correspondence, we can see how he responded to the sufferings of the Aleuts to famine and sickness: he issued ringing clarion calls to their aid and denounced the attitudes of racial superiority that kept them in poverty. Seeing Rusin, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bulgarian mine workers beleaguered and striking to fill their bellies, he gave from his own money to support them, and told his flock to do the same. He financially and spiritually supported Father Alexis (Tovt) in his mission to his fellow Rusins. Seeing Syrians in need, he blessed the Church of Saint Nicholas in Brooklyn for them.
Bishop Tikhon bore his witness by keeping his attention on where he was. Even as an expat, even untethered from his Russian home country, even constantly in travel, even beset – we may easily imagine – by that intense sadness and longing for home, Bishop Tikhon was here, with the Orthodox who had come to the New World from many other shores. Even thus ‘weightless’, he could still give of his own substance for his flock who needed him, and he did so. There was a kind of doyikayt, a ‘here-hood’ even in his life abroad.
My wife’s politics are a good deal more conservative, in the conventional American sense, than mine are. There are a set of typical attitudes that prevail among immigrants in the United States, and she seems to have imbibed many of these, such as: success is the result of effort and intelligence; and those who gain by success have a right to keep it. She has a deep antipathy to affirmative action, which she sees – with some justification, it appears – as a form of discrimination against Asians. She also has next to no patience for the internal ‘identity politics’ of Asian-Americans. Her conviction is that Asian-American groups – including not just Chinese-Americans but also Japanese-, Korean-, Hmong-, Lao- and Vietnamese-Americans – need to work together and put aside their differences rather than keeping to their own separate ethnic enclaves.
But even in the ‘weightlessness’ of life as an expat, she hasn’t lost a deep sense of compassion and solidarity. I’ve seen it repeatedly, and it’s one of the things I fell in love with about her. She made personal connexions with her fellow foreign students in Pittsburgh and was more than willing to help them with either school-related or life problems when they arose. Most recently, upon hearing the news about family separations at the border, she told me bluntly: caring for these people is America’s responsibility. It should be part of our character. There’s more than a little bit of Saint Tikhon’s expat sensibility in my wife’s thinking and manner of expression, and I continue to be endeared to it.
Now, of course, I venerate Saint Tikhon at church not merely for that face – compassionate, fierce, joyful and sad all at once, the face of an expat. There was a great deal of dynamism in that holiness, as I learned from his writings – some of which were even addressed to us Minnesotans, the spiritual children of Holy Father Alexis, and all of which we can still learn from. Saintly Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow, continue to pray to God for me, a sinner.
His Holiness Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky) of Kiev
So, here’s my (as usual) not-so-hot take on the entire Ukrainian autocephaly question.
The usual ‘sides’ have formed up, as is to be expected. The post-Maidan Ukrainian government led by Petro Poroshenko, in concert with the two schismatic jurisdictions in the canonical territory of the Ukraine, have made a request to the Œcumenical Patriarchate to grant a tomos of autocephaly for a unified Ukrainian church. Somewhat more troublingly, they have been supported by a statement of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox churches in the Americas, which are under His All-Holiness Œcumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s omophor. On the other side, there is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church led by His Holiness Metropolitan Onufriy of Kiev, which released a statement condemning the request by the government and imploring the Phanar not to act on it. In this, Metropolitan Onufriy was supported by the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. It’s necessary to note that there are justice concerns involved here from a standpoint of political theology. But these are utterly drenched in various levels of thick theopolitical irony.
I cannot, and don’t intend to, pretend to be a neutral party here. I was chrismated in the Moscow Patriarchate – the sister church of the UOC under Metropolitan Onufriy. And I currently attend a church in the Orthodox Church of America, whose hierarchical standing (but not our canonicity) are currently in question as a result of this same spat between the Œcumenical Patriarchate and the Patriarchate of Moscow and All Rus’. More on that later.
As to the question of political theology and justice, the statement from Metropolitan Antoniy of Borispol’ and Brovary (of the UOC) is by far the most straightforward and simply-worded. His objection to the request for a tomos is threefold. Firstly, the ŒP’s actions abrogate the principle of churchly hospitality due to the recognised Orthodox Church by her sister churches. Secondly, his objection to ‘opening parallel structures’ of different local churches on the same canonical territory as a ‘threat to civil peace’ is in fact rooted in the Œcumenical Patriarchate’s own condemnation of the phyletist heresy in 1872. And thirdly, his objection to the civil government’s origination of the tomos request amounts to an objection against cæsaropapism.
These are very strong arguments, and the fact that they are put forward in so admirably elegant and profound a way, does distract a bit from the overall context. After all, it’s not as though the Moscow Patriarchate (for all I dearly love her) hasn’t ignored the demands of churchly hospitality herself on occasion. And although the Moscow Patriarchate has very good historical reasons to be wary of cæsaropapism, there are good historical reasons for those historical reasons! Even as Moscow has produced wondrous paragons of ‘foolish’ self-abnegation, loving service to the needy and profound unworldly wisdom, still she connived to a degree in her own subjection to her calculating and cynical sæcular princes.
The disestablishment of the Patriarchate by decree of Tsar Pyotr I, which had been bestowed upon Saint Iov by Œcumenical Patriarch Jeremias II (Tranos) of Constantinople 132 years prior, actually did break the Church down into a mere bureau of the civil government until it was restored to Patriarch Saint Tikhon in the very throes of the October Revolution. Again, the irony is delicious: it’s only on account of the Russian Holy Synod’s subjection to the civil government – in the person of Chief Procurator Konstantin Pobedonostsev – that she was able to take such a strong stand on behalf of Constantinople against the Bulgarian phyletists in 1872. Only Moscow’s long direct experience of cæsaropapism allows her sister church in Kiev to speak out with such force against it now!
On the other hand, an irony of a far different sort shrouds the pronouncements of the Ukrainian churches abroad. In marked contrast to the perfunctory statement issued by Metropolitan Antoniy, the letter signed by six Ukrainian-American bishops is distinguished by flowery and often breathless language loaded down with references to ‘tortuous subjugation’, ‘foreign’ domination, ‘visible enemies’ (and note the deliberate juxtaposition which likens these ‘foreigners’ to devils!). It rests on a cunning and carefully-selective – far from ‘simple’ – reading of Church history, in which the primary dates of note are the Baptism of the Rus’ in 988, and the dubious incorporation of the Kievan Metropolia into the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1686. This version of Church history can be disputed, but as presented here it is meant to appeal first and foremost to national pride and honour, and secondly to national humiliation and the need for its redress.
It’s actually somewhat uncanny, how accurately the lay Church historian Gyorgi Fedotov managed to tease out and describe the three spiritual-political trends in the Christianity of the Rus’. Unfortunately, thanks to the historical ironies surrounding this intra-Church spat – most of them self-inflicted – too many of us are tempted to dismiss the substantive justice of the Moscow Patriarchate’s claims on the basis of its history of cæsaropapism. Even when MP clerics refuse to take sides in civil conflict, and make reasoned arguments in appeals to hospitality, humanity and political justice, the cynicism of their political past makes them look insincere.
But what about the autocephaly question itself? I hear you ask. As a layperson in the OCA, all I’ve got to say here is: if you’re looking for autocephaly in the Ukraine, take a number and grab a seat.
And then right about 1920 it really started to hit the fan. The Sergianists tried to seize our Church property. Ethnic enclaves in the United States started peeling away – starting with the Ukrainians (1918) and the Greeks (1922). Russian white émigrés, who had been coming over in increasing numbers since 1905, reasserted themselves as ROCOR. Understandably, our hierarchs attempted to assert temporary independence from the Moscow Patriarchate, which resulted in our being held in ‘canonical limbo’. Patriarch Aleksiy I of Moscow issued us a tomos of autocephaly only in 1970 – a tomos which has been recognised only by the Slavic churches (Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Czechoslovakia and Poland), plus Georgia. Georgia’s autocephaly, granted by the Church of Antioch, followed a remarkably similar process, so that isn’t particularly surprising. Constantinople still refuses to recognise our tomos, although we remain in communion with them and with the other Orthodox churches.
Again, though, this process remains drenched in various historical ironies. To give one modest example: Georgian autocephaly was abrogated by the Russian Holy Synod after the former’s annexation in 1801, ostensibly for the same reasons that Constantinople rejects ours. But once you get past the various theopolitical sophistries, what it really boils down to is that the Phanar simply doesn’t like even the hint of handing over canonical jurisdiction over the Americas to a bunch of honkies. By their lights, American converts and Carpatho-Rusin immigrants in particular were still barbarians.
All things come to he who waits, though. Historically speaking, it’s never been wise for autocephaly decisions to be made ‘in the heat of the moment’. The Greek reactions to the 1970 tomos make for interesting reading, not least because they haven’t aged well. There were, for example, political suspicions – valid perhaps at the time, but now and in retrospect certainly not so – that the new ‘Orthodox Church in America’ was in fact an attempt to further Soviet influence on the American continent. Our experience may be instructive in this regard. Even so, the Greeks had a point: granting a tomos of autocephaly at the height of Cold War paranoias left many American Orthodox Christians in an untenable position. They would do well to take a leaf from their own book. Today, the situation of civil war in the Ukraine and the high sæcular tensions between the Ukraine and Russia that have resulted, create as much suspicion around talk of autocephaly as the Cold War did 48 years ago.
The fact that this request for autocephaly comes from a sæcular government driven by questionable ideological commitments ought to give anyone pause – not just the bishops of ROCOR. In short: if you believe that Jesus saves (and not the princes and sons of men), get back in line.
It is very meet and right to call thee blessed, Who didst bring forth God, Ever blessed and most pure And the Mother of our God. More honourable than the cherubim, And more glorious than the seraphim, Who without spot didst bear the Eternal Word, Thee, very Mother of God, We laud and magnify!
Pray to God for me, O Holy Apostle Matthew, well-pleasing to God, for I eagerly betake myself to thee, who art the speedy helper and intercessor for my soul.
The Heavy Anglophile Orthodox is a blog. Its author occupies a tense and largely-unclaimed space on the Orthosphere somewhere between reaction and revolution.
I am an Orthodox blogger, chrismated into the Moscow Patriarchate and member of an OCA parish in Minneapolis. I am also a happy husband and father of two; an ex-expat of China; and a machinist and part-time English teacher based in the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
I am a Tory radical, although my politics are largely a holdover from my Anglican/Quaker background. My loyalty belongs to the regional culture of the Upper Midwest and Plains states (including Upper Canada), but intellectually I also have Anglophile, Slavophile and Sinophile tendencies. My interests are language, history, genealogy, theology, political œconomy and heavy metal.
