Based and redpilled: China’s war on decadence

The Communist Party of China has been busy lately, to judge from the headlines of late.

Late last year, they not only firmly rapped the knuckles of Alibaba multibillionaire Jack Ma over his complaints about regulatory oversight, they broke up Ant Group and forced its holdings and consumer credit operations to incorporate separately.

This broadened into a more comprehensive crackdown on big megacorporate malfeasance, particularly online businesses and social media groups. Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion by the Chinese government, and thirty-four ecommerce and social media corporations were called to the carpet and slapped with heavy fines for violating Chinese antitrust law: including big names like Tencent, Baidu and Meituan. Private equity firms, online insurance companies and stock traders have also not escaped the wrath of regulators either.

While here in the United States renters are still struggling with things like evictions, expropriation and sexual abuse at the hands of their landlords for failing to meet rent during the coronavirus, China has been busy heavily curbing the power of landlords and preventing such abuses from taking place. Beijing instituted a law recently forbidding landlords from demanding or retaining excessive deposits, and forcing online property vendors in Beijing to comply with the same guidelines as traditional landlords.

Workers’ rights and wage rises have been a major focus of China’s policy recently as well. Xi Jinping promised earlier this year that the state would step up its defence of ‘key groups including college graduates and migrant workers, and the protection of the legitimate interests of truck drivers, couriers and food delivery riders’. He seems to have delivered on this promise, at least partially: express delivery companies have instituted a fee change at the government’s behest, specifically to benefit their couriers. China has also instituted several strong regulations on the ‘gig economy’ in order to prevent predatory collusion, ensure data security, control prices and prevent abuse of providers. The most recent move by the Chinese government on the economic front has been to institute a systemic ban on cryptocurrency trading and mining, which distort markets in actual currency, cause systemic risks to the economy and degrade the environment.

In the interest of getting the rich to comply with tax laws, China has also blacklisted several high-profile celebrities and models who were either implicated in the Kris Wu statutory rape scandal, using their privileged positions to evade taxes (like Fan Bingbing, Zhao Wei and Zheng Shuang), or who promote far-right political positions (like Zhang Zhehan and Lin Xinru).

There has been an increasing effort, as well, to promote the welfare of children and the desirability of having families. This has taken several forms. Firstly, China has been instituting structural reforms to its educational sector. In order to curb unhealthy trends in housing speculation and cutthroat competition for placement in high-end state schools, the Chinese government is attempting to delink school placement from place-of-residence. It has also introduced stringent regulations on private tutoring programmes, forcing them to register as not-for-profit companies by the end of the year, causing some of them to go out of business.

The government is also trying to promote children’s vision and emotional health. One official newspaper referred to online gaming as a form of ‘spiritual opium’ – a rather dire charge for some rather obvious historical reasons. Shortly afterward, the government instituted some fairly reasonable limits on the amount of time and money that minors can spend on online games: 90 minutes a day on weekdays; 3 hours a day on weekends and holidays; none after 10 PM; and no more than $57 a month per user on digital content, DLCs and paid add-ons. Chinese parents are, on the whole, delighted. Additionally, China is promoting additional physical education for young boys in order to get them outside and promote bodily health. On Twitter, these initiatives are called the ‘Touch Grass Campaign’.

China has also been cracking down hard on celebrity worship and idol-based fan culture. After videos surfaced of idol fans dumping massive amounts of milk in order to meet promotional goals for their preferred candidates on a reality show on iQIYI, government pressure forced iQIYI to cancel the show and issue an apology. The government has also shut down several websites and fan groups on social media, including several related to K-pop idols, and put the kibosh on online popularity rankings.

Under particular fire are xiao xianrou (slender and pale young male models catering to a female gaze) and niangpao (male idols who use lipstick and eyeliner, wear earrings and sexually-suggestive clothing, and use effeminate language and mannerisms). Three years ago, Xinhua published a jeremiad against such ‘sissies’, for degrading the culture by promoting ‘vulgar taste’ and a ‘deformed æsthetic’. The government followed up earlier this month by publishing an eight-point guideline for broadcast media that curtail such performances and promote a healthier masculinity and healthier cultural output in general:

1. Boycott illegal or immoral personnel. When selecting entertainers and guests, radio, television and internet platforms should not employ people who have an incorrect political stance, break laws and regulations, or speak or behave against public order and morals.
   
2. Boycott “traffic only” standards. Idol selection shows cannot be shown, as well as shows starring the children of celebrities. Shows should strictly control voting, cannot induce and encourage fans to shop or buy membership in order to vote for their idols.
   
3. Boycott an overly entertaining trend, promote traditional culture, establish a correct beauty standard, boycott “sissy idols”, boycotting daunting wealth, gossip or vulgar internet celebrities.
   
4. Boycott high pay in the entertainment industry. Strictly regulate payment for guests, encourage celebrities to participate in charity shows, punish fake contracts and tax evasion.
   
5. Regulate showbiz staff. Enforce licensing television hosts, provide professional and moral training. Entertainers should not use their profession and fame to gain profit.
   
6. Promote professional commentary in the entertainment industry, insist on correct political direction and values, criticise the fake, ugly and evil values.
   
7. Entertainment associations should provide more training and establish mechanisms for industry regulation, as well as criticise bad examples.
   
8. Regulators need to be more accountable, listen to the people and respond to their concerns, fill public space with positive and mainstream shows.

Perhaps the most promising development of the lot, though, is that China’s leadership is finally wising up to the threat of transhumanism and the gradual instrumental technologisation of ‘human capital’. Recent guidelines on data use are aimed at combatting the use of algorithms in tracking consumer data, protecting privacy, protecting minors and protecting workers from excessive oversight managed by computers. If they are serious about tackling this in a systemic way, then this is something absolutely to be welcomed, particularly since China had previously been in the forefront of exploring the uses of AI in surveillance. Here’s hoping that China is willing to subordinate the Algorithm to the merely-human across the board, not merely in the private sector.

So what does this all amount to?

My understanding of it so far, is that these economically leftist measures on behalf of workers and families, combined with the more conservative cultural measures meant to bolster traditional masculinity, stave off the transhumanist ‘alchemy’ and promote positive cultural output, are both part-and-parcel of a broader war against decadence in China. These outward-facing, public initiatives appear to follow naturally from the earlier work of Xi Jinping’s government to combat corruption and waste within the government specifically. They also seem to be part-and-parcel with Xi’s fondness for the Classics, and make a certain degree of intuitive sense given his own family’s harrowing experiences and suffering during the Cultural Revolution. Speaking personally, I have my doubts about how some of this broad volley of initiatives can succeed, but the aims seem to be correct and laudable ones.

Your Name 《君の名は。》

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.

昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也，自喻適志與！不知周也。俄然覺，則蘧蘧然周也。不知周之夢為胡蝶與，胡蝶之夢為周與？周與胡蝶，則必有分矣。此之謂物化。

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:

Dersu Uzala: Man is small before the face of nature

Vladimir Arsen’ev (Yuri Solomin) and Dersu Uzala (Maksim Munzuk) in Dersu Uzala

I am unfortunately not as well-versed in the filmography of Kurosawa Akira 黑澤明 as I ought to be. The ones which I recall seeing, and all of which I have thoroughly enjoyed, have been Rashômôn, Ikiru and Yume. I’ve only just finished watching Dersu Uzala now, and it is truly one of the most sublime and visually-stunning movies I’ve yet seen. It’s also one which I really should have watched a long time ago when doing this series on North and Central Asian films, because it really places a film like Shaman in context.

Dersu Uzala was a Mosfilm production, but Kurosawa demanded – and was given – full creative control over the screenplay and the direction. That is indisputably for the best. The artistry of the movie is spectacularly lush, a bold and sumptuous 70-millimetre canvas of riotous hues and dazzling lights and darks: the greens, yellows and reds of the forest palette; the masterful use of light and shadow to convey size and distance; the atmospheric effects of sunlight, moonlight, snow, steam and smoke. This movie is, in a word, iconic. The cinematographic ‘language’ Kurosawa uses in Dersu Uzala should be instantly and intimately familiar to Star Wars fans. George Lucas clearly had been watching the sun and moon shot as his inspiration for the Tatooine horizon in Star Wars; the frozen lake sequence as his inspiration for Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back; and the forest scenes in the second half of the film as his inspiration for Endor in Return of the Jedi.

Yet – for all the compliments Lucas paid this film’s imaginative depth in his own work – this is no space opera, but a very much this-worldly ballad of survival in which a small band of men is pitted against the gorgeous ferocity of the Far East Russian taiga and everything it can throw at them: blizzards, raging rapids, traps, bandits and tiger attacks. Humanity manages to weather the spirits of nature, on account of the reverent decency, wisdom and gentleness of one human being in particular.

The screenplay of Dersu Uzala is actually based on the real-life memoirs of Captain Vladimir Klavdievich Arsen’ev, a surveyor and explorer who worked first for the Tsarist government in Russia, and later for the socialist Far Eastern Republic. In 1902 while surveying the lakes of the Ussuri region, he met and came to depend on the eponymous local guide. Dersu Uzala is a trapper and hunter who belongs to the Hezhen [also Hezhe 赫哲, Nanai Нанай or Gol’dy Гольды] people, a tribe closely associated with the Evenkil, the Manchu and the Udegei, with whom they share a common body of lore and traditional shamanic religious customs (though nowadays the Evenki are mostly Orthodox, the Manchu Chinese folk religionists, and the Hezhen and Udegei Vajrayâna Buddhists).

Warning: spoilers below.

Despite an awkward and ambiguous first meeting, Vladimir Arsen’ev (Yuri Solomin) comes to like and admire Dersu (Maksim Munzuk), who has a deep reverence for the forest, and regards all animals and all forces within the woods and hills of the taiga as ‘people’ deserving of the same respect. In addition to being (of course) a deadly sharpshooter, Dersu has unparalleled tracking skills and powers of observation, and is often able to deduce from minute details including touch and smell what transpired in a given place several days back. When Dersu leads Arsen’ev and the military contingent accompanying him to a cabin, and furthermore described the old Chinese traveller who had been there some days before, Arsen’ev begins to trust the trapper to greater degrees.

Dersu Uzala assists in Arsen’ev’s survey mission, and saves Arsen’ev’s life on multiple occasions. He and Dersu get separated from the military unit and lost on a frozen lake just as a blizzard begins to blow up; to escape freezing to death, Dersu and Arsen’ev cut down and bundle the long dead stalks of grass on the lakeshore, and after Arsen’ev collapses from cold and exhaustion Dersu is able to construct a makeshift shelter with it, using the captain’s surveying tripod as a tent frame. Arsen’ev’s men are able to find them once the blizzard passes. Continuing their survey, Dersu assists them in other ways: when their food is running low and they’re at risk of starving, he helps them find an Udegei urireng which has made a catch of fish. While they’re in the shirangju Arsen’ev extends an invitation to Dersu to join him in the city, but Dersu refuses, and says he must leave their company the following day. Arsen’ev, sombre but grateful for Dersu’s help, offers him food and money, and Dersu replies that he can hunt his own food and trap sable furs for money. Instead Dersu reluctantly asks for cartridges, and these Arsen’ev’s men gladly give him. Dersu parts ways with Arsen’ev’s company when they reach the KVŽD.

Five years later, Arsen’ev is mapping the topography of Ussuri. Arsen’ev misses his old friend and hopes to meet him again, and indeed, when one of his soldiers reports that an old Hezhen trapper is asking for Arsen’ev by name, he jumps up and goes to greet him – not even taking his gun despite the young soldier’s precautions. Dersu gladly joins Arsen’ev’s party again as a guide. Once more they rely on his help, as when they need to ford a river by a raft and one of Arsen’ev’s men loses a pole in the river, setting the raft adrift. Dersu pushes Arsen’ev off the raft and tells him to swim ashore. And then it falls to Arsen’ev’s men to save Dersu, who clings to a log in the river to save himself from the rapids beyond, which are vicious enough to destroy the raft.

Dersu spends the rest of the autumn in Ussuri with Arsen’ev’s expedition, and Arsen’ev recollects it warmly, saying that his fondest memories of Dersu are from that autumn. But autumns in Siberia are short. Arsen’ev’s party happens across a part of Ussuri which is frequented by tigers, but also by predators of a more mundane sort: honghuzi 红胡子, or ex-Boxer rebels who have taken to banditry in the border country. The honghuzi make their living by trapping, but Dersu is appalled at their methods, saying that they kill more than they need. They also prey on local Chinese people, stealing the women and leaving the men bound up in mosquito-infested waters to die. Arsen’ev and Dersu free the living animals from the traps, rescue the imprisoned men, and assist the local Chinese baojia 保甲 militia – led by a certain Zhang Bao (Súımónkul Chokmarov) – in hunting down the honghuzi. Later they come across a tiger who has been following them. In order to save Arsen’ev, Dersu shoots the tiger, wounding it. Chagrined, Dersu drops his rifle, and explains to Arsen’ev that the tiger will run until it dies, and then the lord of the forest Kanga (similar to Ilmun Han in the Tale of the Nišan Shamaness) will send another tiger to kill him for this bad deed.

Dersu sinks into an ill mood after that, lashing out at the other members of the party and alienating them. He also begins to lose his eyesight – and for a rifle-hunter like Dersu, that is an irreparable loss. His fears of the tiger’s vengeance also begin to grow, and Dersu takes up Arsen’ev on his offer of hospitality. Arsen’ev allows Dersu to move in with his wife Anna (Svetlana Danilchenko) and his young son Vova (Dmitri Korshakov) in Khabarov, and they all welcome him warmly – in particular Vova, who hero-worships Dersu. However, Dersu faces difficulty in adapting to city life. He cannot understand why people sell water and firewood when they should be able to go out and get it for free. He cannot understand why people aren’t allowed to shoot guns inside the city. And he becomes listless being caged up in a ‘box’ and longs to sleep outside. After he is arrested for trying to chop down a tree in the city park, he asks Arsen’ev if he can return to the hills, since he knows he can’t live in the city. Before he leaves, Arsen’ev gives Dersu a rifle – the latest model, so that he can’t miss even with his poor eyesight.

At the end of the film, Arsen’ev gets a telegram saying that a dead Hezhen has been found with his name-card on him, and the investigator is requesting a positive identification from him. Arsen’ev goes to where they found the body, and on seeing him confirms that it is Dersu. The investigator is surprised on hearing that he is a hunter, saying he found no gun near the body. When Arsen’ev tells him he’d given Dersu a new rifle, the policeman speculates that he might have been killed for it. The policeman orders his assistants to bury Dersu, and Arsen’ev stands his walking stick up at the head of his grave.

End spoilers.

Dersu Uzala seems to be something of an inspirational touchstone, not only for Star Wars here in the West but also for the whole genre of Siberia-based survival films. One can see deliberate echoes of both Kurosawa’s cinematographic and thematic preferences in the Ermek Tursynov films Kelin and Shal, for example. Given Rustam Mosafir’s self-avowed admiration for Kurosawa and for genre film in general, it’s little surprise that there should be deliberate echoes of Dersu Uzala in Begletsy: both the colour palette of the forest scenes, and the character of the Evenki hunter who helps the runaways and muses on the strange and contradictory lusts of the white man for gold and for otherworldly bliss. And, of course, in Shaman we see the same tensions between a hostile but beautiful and bewitching Siberian taiga, and the city life to which the main character cannot return.

In a sense, then, Dersu Uzala can be seen to belong firmly in the tradition of the Ostern: the transposition of the American Wild West onto the Eastern frontiers of Russian and Soviet expansion into North and Central Asia. But despite the sumptuous settings and Kurosawa’s obvious affection for his Siberian wildscapes, this is not a film about primordial antiquity versus modern encroachment, nor – despite Dersu’s frequent disparagements of the greed and wastefulness of poachers or certain of the city folk – is it necessarily an œcologically-minded film, though those elements are present as well.

The struggle for survival is the story structure which allows Kurosawa to dwell on the purely human elements that struggle exposes. It really is a film about the friendship between these two men. And it is about the genuine sweetness, generosity, hospitality and reverence of Dersu Uzala himself. Dersu may be considered a continuation of Kurosawa’s bushidô-influence ideal type, particularly with his sharpshooting skill and his intimate knowledge of and respect for nature. But his temperament is very far from martial. Although his entire family was killed by a smallpox outbreak, ostensibly caused by the encroachment of the Cossacks, there is nothing in him that suggests any sort of desire for revenge. (Yes, even we box-dwelling types can learn a thing or two from Dersu in our day and age.) Instead, his character is marked by humility, generosity even for people he might never see, selfless compassion for those in danger. There is much more of the Eastern Orthodox solitary hermit about him than the daimyô.

To conclude: Dersu Uzala is powerful, profound and sublime. Though it’s considered a minor work in Kurosawa’s opus, not necessarily having the drama of Rashômôn or the dynamic action of The Seven Samurai, there’s still plenty here to hold one’s interest. It truly is worth watching for the masterful camerawork and the obvious affection for the land that Kurosawa was moved to use wide-gauge high-resolution film to contain. I can’t possibly recommend it highly enough.

Beloe solntse pustyni: a deserving cult-classic Ostern

Rahimov (Musa Dudaev) and Suhov (Anatolii Kuznetsov) in Beloe solntse pustyni

Ваше благородие, госпожа Разлука,
Все мы с ней не встретимся, вот какая штука.
Письмецо в конверте погоди не рви,
Не везет мне в смерти – повезет в любви!

I had forgotten just how much I love this film – the first Soviet film I ever watched as a callow youth of twenty-two. That’s to my chagrin. Still, I can and will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first release of Vladimir Motyl’s directorial masterpiece in 1970. It is traditional for Soviet and Russian cosmonauts to watch Beloe solntse pustyni (White Sun of the Desert) before launch, as a good-luck charm. That has something of an ironic echo in my own case, since I first watched this movie in preparation for my ill-fated but quite formative trip to Kazakhstan in 2009. Now, over ten years later, of course I can look back on that whole episode with a smiling eye – and I can watch Beloe solntse pustyni with a bit more appreciation and grounding in the Western (and Ostern) genre’s conventions. With all due thanks, of course, to Rich Hall.

Beloe solntse pustyni takes place in the deserts of Central Asia, and follows one adventure in the life of a Red Army veteran of the Caspian Regiment ‘Ferdinand August Bebel’, Fyodor Ivanovich Suhov (Anatolii Kuznetsov) as he attempts to make his way home to his wife Katerina Matveevna (Galina Luchai) from his posting in Turkestan. On the way back he meets and rescues a man buried up to his neck in the desert – Said (Spartak Mishulin), a sharpshooter on a quest for vengeance against his father’s killer. In the next city he finds a Red Army detachment led by Rahimov (Musa Dudaev) as they’ve taken charge of nine women who were the wives of a certain cruel and vengeful Basmachi rebel captain named Abdulla (Kahi Kavsadze). Rahimov manages to convince Suhov to take the young women into his charge while he gets reinforcements, and he commandeers a local museum to shelter the women and fend off Abdulla until Rahimov returns. Suhov, and his young helper Petruha (Nikolai Godovikov) are left to their own devices, appealing – at first unsuccessfully – to the local customs officer, Pavel Vereshchagin (Pavel Luspekaev).

There’s a great deal to appreciate about this iconic film, justly considered a cult classic and beloved by generations of Russians. The premise of the film, to begin with, is Homeric in tenor: Suhov, the veteran of a great expedition to the East, finds himself wandering back home with small hope of return, yet vividly remembering and cherishing the memory of the Penelope to his Odysseus, his wife Katerina – to whom he composes mental letters, which serve as narration in the film. And on his travels he faces trials and temptations both, all of which seem to offer contemporary parallels to the monsters and beauties which grace the Odyssey. When I watched this film many years ago I lavished praises on the character of Said, whose laconic charisma and sang-froid is even now quite compelling to me. But despite his continuing ‘coolness’ as the hired gun who never misses, I’ve found that the other characters in the film, particularly Petruha and Vereshchagin, have taken on intriguing dimensions and meaning in light of a classical reference which I had little conception of on my first watch.

If there is a Greek chorus to observe Suhov’s feats, actually, it’s a silent one – but no less eloquent for all that. The four aqsaqaldar, literally white-bearded old men, who sit by the wall on the Caspian seaside hardly say a single word the entire time, but they are there watching, often with patient bemusement, all the outlandish and violent events unfold in front of them. As seems appropriate in a film like this, there is a deliberate contraposition of the bleak desert with its vast dunes and rugged stone architecture with the idyllic, green and red flower-covered meadows of Suhov’s home with his beloved Katerina standing patiently among them, only glimpsed in flashbacks or daydreams. (Suhov spends a lot of his time on screen reclining or napping on the sand, often to comic effect.) The colour schemes are entirely different, and they offer us tantalising hints into Suhov’s inner psychology and motivations.

As seems to be a commonplace in Westerns, the weapons are reflections of the characters of the people who wield them. Suhov wields a Nagant revolver, while Abdulla wields a Mauser C96 – the weapons of ‘gentleman’ cavalry officers. The ill-fated Petruha wields a rifle with a bayonet attached, which never manages to fire except on accident. The Basmachi bandits all wield carbines. Vereshchagin either fights with his bare fists or hurls sticks of dynamite – both a testament to his temper and a foreshadowing of his tragicomic demise. Said, the survivor, successfully improvises with whatever is closest to hand, whether it’s stealing an enemy’s gun or throwing a knife.

The relationships between men and women are another filmic motif: Suhov’s devotion to his wife notwithstanding, his suddenly being placed in charge of Abdulla’s harem, together with a green youngster who clearly has no experience with women, places a significant temptation on him, as we are made to see through his daydreams. The fundamentally decent Suhov represents a familial ethic which is new and Soviet as far as his charges are concerned: one woman for one husband, and one husband’s affections for one wife. Suhov gains the attentions – or at least curiosity – of one of Abdulla’s burqa-wearing wives, the fifteen-year-old Gúlchataı (Tatyana Fedotova), whom Petruhov also admires despite not ever being able to see her face. Gúlchataı struggles to understand the benefits of Christian-slash-Soviet monogamy, seeing the lot of a single wife in charge of an entire household’s chores as drudgery – but it also seems she’s the most receptive to the idea. This motif of a progressive versus an Islâmic-patriarchal understanding of sexuality does not actually shy away from subtly ribbing the Soviet position. Suhov posts big red propaganda posters around the museum reading – in Russian – things like ‘Women are human beings too!’ But at the same time, Suhov does occasionally entertain the fantasy of keeping a harem, with Katerina as the chief wife and supervisor…

And then there is the relationship between Vereshchagin and his own wife Nastasya (Raisa Kurkina): the old customs officer is torn between a certain degree of domestic security, bought at the cost of compromises with Abdulla’s gang at the behest of his wife, and his formerly glorious and daring military past – which is symbolised in the film by a kind of sæcular iconostasis on one wall of the customs-house, with paintings and lithographs, maps and old photographs – these of himself with his much-younger wife in his military attire and medals. There are hints and flashes of the old fire in Vereshchagin, and these are brought out mainly by his meeting with young Petruhov, to whom Vereshchagin takes an instant liking. It is strongly implied by the film that Petruhov reminds Vereshchagin of his own deceased son, whose military grave is far-off and unattended. Vereshchagin is also the one who strums and sings the folk song ‘Ваше благородие, госпожа Разлука’ quoted above, and which forms something of a theme for the film. It reflects also something of Vereshchagin’s predicament, being estranged from his old home, being unlucky in death but lucky in love with a devoted (but somewhat smothering and overprotective) wife.

The overall tone of the film is light, however – even comic. It is brisk-paced, well-choreographed with regard to the gunfights and standoffs, and has the benefit of never taking itself too seriously, allowing for its saturnine humour and its immortal one-liners: ‘The East is a delicate matter,’ for instance; ‘His grenades are the wrong type!’; and ‘Save at least one bullet, Abdulla, to shoot yourself!’ The main locations for filming were Dagestan (on the other side of the Caspian) and Turkmenistan for a few of the desert scenes. Luga, south of Saint Petersburg, was chosen for the pastoral location for shooting Suhov’s daydreams and flashbacks with Katerina. The palette for the film is notably warm, even gaudy, when compared with other films of the time. This is counterbalanced by a certain staid realism in the cinematography: lots of slow pans and flat, static takes, allowing the audience to have the same sort of ironic detachment from the action that the aqsaqaldar have, sitting outside in the sun.

If it weren’t already obvious, I consider Beloe solntse pustyni to be fully deserving of its status among the classics of Soviet film, full stop. Not for nothing was it added to the register of culturally significant films in Russia in 1998! It can easily bear the comparison to any Western of its time. It’s shot against starkly beautiful Caspian desertscapes. Its characters are all entirely and understandably human – even the homicidally jealous villain. It hits just the right notes of comedy and melancholia, action and emotion to solidify its place in cinema, and its classical literary moorings take it just that extra step beyond into the category of high art. This one’s absolutely a keeper.

A tropological analysis of B-plot couples in Cadfael

Richard Henders as Torold Blund, Juliette Caton as Godith Adeney, and Derek Jacobi as Brother Cadfael in the ITV film version of One Corpse Too Many

Any fan of whodunits (and I am one) will readily attest to the fact that, in addition to the mystery that drives the action and the complications of human motivation and capacity for deceit, there is also often other motivation at play for the sleuth and for the supporting casts. Edith Pargeter’s Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, the theologically-dense historical murder mysteries set in the English Anarchy on the Shropshire border between England and Wales (which come highly recommended from yours truly), are no exception. My hagiographical bender on the English and Welsh saints led me back to Pargeter’s mediæval murder mystery series, as she features many of these saints prominently in her books: Saint Gwenffrewi most of all, who is a silent protagonist (or perhaps not-so-silent?) in A Morbid Taste for Bones; but also by mention throughout the series Saints Beuno, Dyfrig, Deiniol, Non, Eleri, Mildburg, Illtud, Tysilio, Ceadda, Cyndeyrn, Asaph and Óswald. Cadfael even refers to himself as being ‘as Welsh as Dewi Sant’. Some Eastern saints even get a mention – in particular Saint John Chrysostom.

The novels often explore themes of politics and loyalty; religious devotion; other devotions such as duty and honour; family ties between parents and children, siblings and spouses; and, of course, the love between man and woman. Brother Cadfael is often assisted in the garden by a fellow Benedictine from the monastery. But very often his episodic helper in solving the mystery at hand is one half of a romantic pair – or, in some cases, both halves – whose lives are interrupted by crime or by the historical events unfolding around them. And often enough, Cadfael is called upon to play the part of a Friar Lawrence, a silent or not-so-silent helper to the B-plot romantic pairing.

Edith Pargeter is a master at portraying complex, subtle and occasionally-contradictory, perverse and tormented human beings in her books, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t, like all good fiction writers when starting a new work afresh, draw from a template. In her books, the romantic B-plots tend to fall into five broad (but often overlapping) categories. (I am posting a general SPOILER ALERT for the following numbered list, because some of these involve important plot twists in the books.)

1. Classic Star-Crossed:
   It’s fairly easy to tell that this is Edith Pargeter’s favourite kind of pairing. She loves putting young people into awkward positions where they fall in love with someone they supposedly can’t have, where they face a cultural gap or reticent parents or poverty, or where the A-plot murder mystery falls between them – usually with one of them as the too-obvious suspect pursued by the law. And of course, for these pairings, love thrives on adversity, ill circumstances and opposition. One or other of the pairing will almost always be Cadfael’s Girl Friday or Man Friday of the week, or play some sort of active role in solving the A-plot mystery.
   
   Some of these couples are noble: Sioned and Engelard; Joscelin and Iveta; Elis and Melicent; Eliud and Cristina; Roscelin and Helicende. These star-crossed lovers will be the victims of arranged marriages or parental tyranny in some way. In a couple of cases – Sioned and Engelard; Elis and Melicent – cross-border suspicions between Welsh and English are a complicating factor. One coupling – Roscelin and Helicende in The Confession of Brother Haluin – is a narrowly-averted case of aunt-nephew incest with præfiguring shades of Poppy Hill. But, despite its occasional over-the-top excesses, the sub rosa courtship of Joscelin Lucy and Iveta de Massard in The Leper of Saint Giles is the best example. Joscelin and Iveta are both more than determined to sacrifice themselves for the sake of delivering the other, and exemplify toward each other a ‘passion’ – Joscelin’s word – that plausibly manifests itself as a mutual chivalric noblesse oblige.
   
   Other of these pairs of young lovers – Ælfric and Aldith in Monk’s Hood; Liliwin and Rannilt in The Sanctuary Sparrow; Hyacinth and Annet in The Hermit of Eyton Forest; Tutilo and Daalny in The Holy Thief – are working-class or unfree. In these cases the man is always among the prime suspects in the murder, and it’s the job of his female better half to help Brother Cadfael figure out whodunit. Oftentimes the man in these cases cannot come forward to declare his own innocence, either because of social strictures or out of a highly-justifiable lack of faith in the law to do right by him. Even Hugh Beringar cannot escape the class obligations of his feudal setting when it comes to some of these cases, however much he might want to; thus Cadfael is often left as the confidant of the beleaguered too-obvious suspect.
   
   Other examples bend the trope a bit: ‘Matthew’ is hotfoot on a quest for revenge when it gets complicated by a liking for Melangell in The Pilgrim of Hate. Heledd’s status as the daughter of a Welsh priest in a rapidly-‘reforming’ Roman Church makes her something of an outcast in general in The Summer of the Danes. She rebels against her father’s arrangement of a suitably-distant marriage for her, and flees it – right into the arms of a suitably-personable Hiberno-Danish captor, Turcaill.


2. Lovable Dork (m) x Confident Competent (f):
   This is another favourite pairing of Pargeter’s in the Cadfael series. Edith Pargeter likes to point out, both subtly and explicitly, that girls mature far faster than boys do. Thus, many of her B-plot pairings involve teenage girls who are precocious, sophisticated, intelligent, capable, confident and sexually assertive. These girls end up chasing after their favoured older male suitors, who, while appropriately endearing, invariably lags one or two steps behind them. Usually, the girl is more actively involved in solving the mystery – or more wrapped up in its dangers – than the boy.
   
   Godith and Torold from One Corpse Too Many are sort of the archetype of this trope. Godith, who rescues a wounded and half-drowned Torold from the Severn, is first possessive of him as a patient and then determined in her pursuit of him, who for the first part of their relationship seems utterly oblivious to the fact that she’s a girl, let alone one that has any romantic attachment to him. Thankfully, Torold’s fairly quick on the uptake himself.
   
   Isouda also fits this trope to a ‘T’, the younger childhood playmate of Meriet in The Devil’s Novice who knows she wants him and knows she can convince him to want her too. Fortunata in The Heretic’s Apprentice, the determined lover of the several-years-older Elave, also plays this trope dead straight. Emma can certainly play the ingénue, and does so for the benefit of Cadfael and Hugh Beringar and her suitor Philip Corviser, but her central rôle in Saint Peter’s Fair shows her to be a far more formidable mind and spirit in general than she lets on – a match even for her uncle’s murderer. Others that more loosely fit the trope are: Sioned and Engelard in A Morbid Taste for Bones, and Sulien and Pernel in The Potter’s Field. Even though they are closer in age than the other couples in this trope, the girl is shown to be more sophisticated and mature than the boy, and takes a more active rôle in solving the mystery.


3. Bad Monk (m) x Second Chance (f):
   You can’t have a series centred on a Benedictine monastery without getting a few wayward and regretful postulants mixed in. The wayward Benedictine will get himself tangled deep in the A-plot mystery, only to discover along the way that other pretty girls exist besides the one that drove him to his vows. He will end up deciding that perhaps the celibate life is not for him.
   
   The archetypical bad-monk / second-chance pairing is the English ‘Brother’ John and the Welsh blacksmith Bened’s lovely niece Annest in A Morbid Taste for Bones. ‘Brother’ John aids in Engelard’s escape from the law; Bened volunteers to hold him until the cantref authorities come; and Annest manages to convince him to leave the Order for her, despite not knowing English (nor he any Welsh).
   
   Other examples played straight in the series are ‘Brother’ Meriet and Isouda (The Devil’s Novice), ‘Brother’ Sulien and Pernel (The Potter’s Field), ‘Brother’ Tutilo and Daalny (The Holy Thief). The trope gets subverted and gender-bent with ‘Brother’ Godric – actually Godith Adeney – and Torold Blund in One Corpse Too Many; in An Excellent Mystery, the trope gets both gender-bent and love-triangled with Brother Humilis, ‘Brother’ Fidelis – actually a woman in disguise – and Nicholas Harnage. The ‘bad nun’ variant of this pairing is always averted in the Cadfael mysteries: the young female lovers who consider taking the veil, like Melicent Prestcote in Dead Man’s Ransom or Judith Perle in The Rose Rent, never actually do.


4. Type-A Tsun / Hurting Hero x Fixer-Upper:
   For some reason toward the middle of her series, Edith Pargeter started going a bit ‘angsty’ – or at least, her B-plot young people did. One half of the pairing would be guilt-ridden or consumed with vengeance (or both), and would need counselling from Cadfael or, as often as not, Avice of Thornbury / Sister Magdalen. But the real work of doing the fix-up would fall to the other half of the pairing.
   
   Probably the best examples of this trope are ‘Matthew’ and Melangell in The Pilgrim of Hate. ‘Matthew’ starts a romance with Melangell while they are both on pilgrimage to visit the bones of (supposedly) Saint Gwenffrewi in Shrewsbury. However, he is also in deadly pursuit of the villain who killed his lord in cold blood in the streets of Winchester. Melangell doesn’t understand this and attempts to reason with him; he treats her coldly and even strikes her in his rage. Only when he returns, getting a chance at revenge and then relinquishing it to God, is Melangell able to reach him.
   
   In Dead Man’s Ransom Melicent Prestcote is the angsty one, in grief and rage and something like survivor’s guilt over her murdered father, and Elis ap Cynan the one who tries to win her over. The widow Judith Perle and the widower Niall Bronzesmith in The Rose Rent are another example played straight – ultimately they help work through each other’s grief over their lost spouses. The trope is semi-averted with Sulien Blount in The Potter’s Field, grieving over a dead woman he’d had an infatuation for; and his determined and optimistic sweetheart Pernel Otmere, who brings him peace by helping Cadfael solve the mystery of her death. Heledd in The Summer of the Danes inclines strongly to the Type-A tsun end of the spectrum; Turcaill certainly has nothing of the angsty about him, but he does offer her an escape from a fate that she never chose for herself.


5. Political Comrades:
   In the Cadfael Chronicles, often the lovers will belong to the same political faction, and they will meet and fall for each other while serving or undertaking some mission or stratagem for their liege lord or lady. Given Pargeter’s healthy preference for highly-competent women, the chances are that the girl will be as badass as the boy.
   
   Both pairings in One Corpse Too Many are examples of this. Hugh Beringar and Aline Siward are both partizans of King Stephen, while Godith Adeney and Torold Blund are partizans of the opposing Empress Maud. All four lovers are involved, by stages, in the same quest to find the murderer of one of Maud’s errand-men, Nicholas Faintree – but they have very different motives and justifications for doing so. In The Raven in the Foregate, Torold Blund’s young companion Ninian Bachiler finds love as well as camaraderie from another partizan of Maud in Shrewsbury, Sanan de Bernières.
   
   Other examples include Olivier de Bretagne and Ermina Hugonin from The Virgin in the Ice. Ermina is the niece of Laurence d’Angers, a Crusader loyal to Empress Maud – and Olivier de Bretagne is the half-Syrian, half-Welsh Crusader’s child who joins Laurence d’Angers in the Holy Land and later rescues Ermina and her brother Yves from masterless brigands in Shropshire. Elave and Fortunata are also somewhat in line with this trope. Fortunata always liked Elave, but she became even more attached to him after Elave came under suspicion of hæresy, for questioning certain opinions of Saint Augustine in The Heretic’s Apprentice.

Perhaps at a later time, I will have a more thorough appreciation for Edith Pargeter’s mystery novels forthcoming. Her thematic preoccupations on loyalty, on honour, on truth, on war and peace – these put her not too far out of reach of the wuxia genre on the other side of the world. At the moment, though, I hope that a partial appreciation of some of her minor characters is not too far out of line. Even if they do in general fall along several broad characterisations, Pargeter’s eye for detail and subtle understandings of psychology render these characters bright and vital within their settings.

The Orthodox apprentice

On this blog I have occasionally had opportunity to make reference to the excellent Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, a series of murder mysteries set in twelfth-century Wales and the English West Country, written by Edith Pargeter under the nom de plume of Ellis Peters. These novels are charming and cleverly-crafted whodunits in their own right, with the eponymous Welsh Benedictine brother using his knowledge of medicines and herbalism, his vast and varied experience of human nature and his stores of human sympathy and patience to solve the mystery. He is aided by the wry and quick-witted Hugh Beringar, a young Norman landowner who works his way up the ranks in King Stephen’s service to become his sheriff in Shrewsbury. Even though he’s the voice of the law, he is both fair-minded enough and curious enough to be an equal partner in these endeavours rather than a rival or an adversary – even though Cadfael sometimes has to be devious in keeping the too-obvious suspects who engage his sympathy well out of Hugh’s way when he is duty-bound to find them but doesn’t want to.

I’ve been rereading these books straight through, in part inspired by this series on the English and Welsh saints that I’ve been doing – in particular Saint Gwenffrewi, who is herself something of a major character in the series. And then I stumbled back over The Heretic’s Apprentice, the sixteenth (or seventeenth, depending on which version you read) entry in the series. Quite accidentally, I seem to have unearthed one of the fragmentary signposts that has led me on my current path. Edith Pargeter seems to have given me a little nudge along the road in this direction.

Seven years before the events of The Heretic’s Apprentice, a wool merchant, William of Lythwood, left Shrewsbury and took his clerk Elave with him on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. William of Lythwood was known to have expressed certain doubts about the Trinity in the presence of a parish priest, who recommended to him that he undertake the pilgrimage for his own soul’s sake. Elave, when he went along with, kept his ears and eyes open all the way along. As The Heretic’s Apprentice begins, Elave returns from Jerusalem, pushing a cart with a coffin – containing William of Lythwood, seeking rest in the abbey graveyard after his long travels.

Elave seeks an audience with Abbot Radulfus, who is playing host to a high-ranking Augustinian canon named Gerbert, representing Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. He brings his master William’s last request before the Abbot, though Gerbert is wary of any attempt to have the merchant interred – the more so when he discovers that William had given voice to hæretical opinions in the past. Though William is discovered to have died absolved and is granted his grave in abbey ground, Elave’s troubles do not end there.

He brings back another, smaller box – this one for William’s foster-daughter Fortunata, meant to be her dowry. This box is an intricate piece, carven and inlaid with silver and ivory, and featuring a Byzantine icon on the front which Anselm, one of the abbey monks, believes may be Saint John Chrysostom. This box, brought into the merchant’s household – now run by William’s brothers Girard and Jevan – also brings covetousness and anxiety. The family’s chief shepherd, Conan, admires the box and wonders what it contains – and notes that the owner of the box, Fortunata, has eyes only on Elave when he comes back. And the family’s clerk, Aldwin, remembering Elave’s prior influence with the Lythwood family and fearing for his position, wants him driven out. Conan and Aldwin conspire to brand Elave a hæretic so Gerbert will chase him off; but Aldwin, later learning that his position was never in any danger from Elave, regrets the conspiracy and goes to Gerbert to attempt to put the record right. Aldwin never gets there – he is stabbed in the back and thrown into the Severn. Hence, the murder mystery around which the book revolves.

But what interests me particularly is that, when Conan and Aldwin attempt to get Elave to express his ‘hæretical’ opinions, he instead posits ideas which are wholly in line with Orthodox Christian thinking. This makes sense within the world of the story, as he just came back from Jerusalem and Syria. Here, though, is the relevant passage:

William’s wake was well supplied with ale, wine and mead, and went the way of most wakes, from dignified solemnity and pious remembrance to sentimental and increasingly elaborated reminiscence, while discreet voices grew louder and anecdotes borrowed as much from imagination as from memory. And since Elave had been his companion for seven year while he had been out of sight and often out of mind of these old neighbours of his, the young man found himself being plied with the best ale in the house, in exchange for the stories he had to tell of the long journey and the wonders along the way, and of William’s dignified farewell to the world.

If he had not drunk considerably more than he was accustomed to, he might not have given direct and open answers to oblique and insinuating questions…

“According to one of the brothers down there,” said Aldwin earnestly, “the little anxious grey fellow that runs so busy about the prior, it was a question whether the old man would be let in at all. Somebody there was for digging up that old scuffle he had with the missioner, to deny him a place.”

“It’s a grave matter to disagree with the Church,” agreed Conan, shaking his head. “It’s not for us to know better than the priests, not where faith’s concerned. Listen and say Amen, that’s my advice. Did ever William talk to you about such things, Elave? You travelled a long way and a good many years with him. Did he try to take you along with him down that road, too?”

“He never made any secret of what he thought,” said Elave. “He’d argue his point, and with good sense, too, even to priests, but there was none of them found any great fault with him for thinking about such things. What are wits for unless a man uses them?”

“That’s presumption,” said Aldwin, “in simple folk like us, who haven’t the learning or the calling of the church men. As the king and the sheriff have power over us in their field, so has the priest in his. It’s not for us to meddle with matters beyond us. Conan’s right, listen and say Amen!”

“How can you say Amen to damning a newborn child to hell because the little thing died before it could be baptised?” Elave asked reasonably. “It was one of the things that bothered him. He used to argue not even the worst of men could throw a child into the fire, so how could the good God? It’s against his nature.”

“And you,” said Aldwin, staring curiosity and concern, “did you agree with him? Do you say so, too?”

“Yes, I do say so. I can’t believe the reason they give us, that babes are born into the world already rotten with sin. How can that be true? A creature new and helpless, barely into this world, how can it ever have done wrong?”

“They say,” ventured Conan cautiously, “even babes unborn are rotten with the sin of Adam, and fallen with him.”

“And I say that it’s only his own deeds, bad and good, that a man will have to answer for in the judgement, and that’s what will save or damn him. Though it’s not often I’ve known a man so bad as to make me believe in damnation,” said Elave, still absorbed in his own reasoning, and intent only on expressing himself clearly and simply without suspicion of hostility or danger. “There was a father of the Church, once, as I heard tell, in Alexandria, who held that in the end everyone would find salvation. Even the fallen angels would return to their fealty, even the devil would repent and make his way back to God.”

He felt the chill and the shiver that went through his audience, but thought no more of it than that his travelled wisdom, small as it still was, had carried him out of the reach of their parochial innocence. Even Fortunata, listening silently to the talk of the menfolk, had stiffened and opened her eyes wide and round at such an utterance, startled and perhaps shocked. She said nothing in this company, but she followed every word that was spoken, and the colour ebbed and flowed in her cheeks as she glanced attentively from face to face.

“That’s blasphemous,” said Aldwin in an awed whisper. “The Church tells us there’s no salvation but by grace, not by works. A man can do nothing to save himself, being born sinful.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Elave stubbornly. “Would the good God have made a creature so imperfect that he can have no free will of his own to choose between right and wrong? We can make our own way toward salvation, or down into the muck, and at the last we must every one stand by his own acts in the judgement. If we are men we ought to make our own way towards grace, not sit on our hams and wait for it to lift us up.”

“No, no, we’re taught differently,” insisted Conan doggedly. “Men are fallen by the first fall, and incline towards evil. They can never do good but by the grace of God.”

“And I say they can and do! A man can choose to avoid sin and do justly, of his own will, and his own will is the gift of God, and meant to be used. Why should a man get credit for leaving it all to God?” said Elave, roused but reasonable. “We think about what we’re doing daily with our hands, to earn a living. What fools we should be not to give a thought to what we’re doing with our souls, to earn an eternal life. Earn it,” said Elave with emphasis, “not wait to be given it unearned.”

“It’s against the Church Fathers,” objected Aldwin just as strongly. “Our priest here preached a sermon once about Saint Augustine, how he wrote that the number of the elect is fixed and not to be changed, and all the rest are lost and damned, so how can their free will and their own acts help them? Only God’s grace can save. Everything else is vain and sinful.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Elave loudly and firmly. “Or why should we even try to deal justly? These very priests urge us to do right, and demand of us confession and penance if we fall short. Why, if the roll is already made up? Where is the sense of it? No, I do not believe it!”

Aldwin was looking at him in awed solemnity. “You do not believe even Saint Augustine?”

“If he wrote that, no, I do not believe him.”

Let’s take a look at the exact beliefs that got Elave in trouble with the Augustinian Canon Gerbert in the novel. Though there is a certain degree of anachronism in Pargeter’s ascription to concerns that are very specifically sixteenth-century in provenance to churchmen of the twelfth, the theological stakes here examined are quite real and Elave’s concerns seem to be very specific.

1. Elave disbelieves that newborn babies who die before baptism will be damned to hell, asserting that it is against God’s personality.


2. He disbelieves that babies are born rotten with the sin of Adam.


3. He considers – considers, but does not endorse – Origen’s version of apōkatastasis.


4. He believes in human free will.


5. He asserts a model of salvation in which works and grace both matter.

As stated, from an Orthodox Christian perspective of the sort he and William might very well have come across among priests in the twelfth-century Holy Land, there’s not that much wrong with what Elave gives expression to here. Elave mostly takes issue, by name, with a certain interpretation of Augustine taken to a logical extreme.

The Orthodox Church does not teach that unbaptised babies are condemned to hell. We have the iconography of the Holy Innocents to prove it, as well as the authoritative witnesses of Saint Gregory the Theologian, Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Mâr ’Afrâm as-Sûryâni. Indeed, we have also the authoritative testimony of Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem attesting to the idea that God’s personality is such that He does not will anyone’s condemnation. The Orthodox Church also does not teach that babies are born rotten with Adam’s sin – a sin for which Adam and Eve only are responsible – even though all of us who are born into a fallen world must deal with the consequences of that first Fall.

It’s also interesting what Elave has to say on the subject of apōkatastasis. It’s worth noting that later in the book, when he comes before the court of Abbot Radulfus and Canon Gerbert and the witnesses to his opinions are cross-examined, that he does not endorse the teachings of Origen on salvation; he merely notes, with interest, that they exist. (It is in fact Abbot Radulfus who mentions Origen by name.)

From an Orthodox perspective Elave gets into a little bit of trouble, doctrinally speaking, when it comes to the question of grace and works – but there the whole question is framed in such a way as to make it hard for anyone to escape trouble, at least if they come at it from the perspective of human reason alone. Elave is grappling, in fact, with many of the same questions of spiritual discipline that Abba Cassian – whose leap-day feast we just celebrated! – grappled with in his entrance into the disputes between Augustine and Pelagius, and on the same grounds. Elave narrowly manages to preserve himself from the charge of Pelagianism here, by asserting that the free will by which a man can choose to cooperate with God in his own salvation is a gift of that same God. But there’s little else in the passage for Abba Cassian or for later Orthodox authorities to disagree with, unless it is that overly-hasty ‘I say they can and do!’ which is his retort to Aldwin’s exaggerated Augustinianism. There indeed he is reflecting an overly-rationalistic, Western perspective on matters of faith.

I read this book first when I was in high school, and I think Pargeter’s very Anglican objections, through her strong-minded pilgrim Elave, to an overly-zealous and -legalistic read of Augustine impacted me more than I then knew. Even as an Anglican, I had quibbles with the ideas of infant damnation and the directly-imputed model of original sin that found better articulation within the realm of Orthodox theology. Reading through this book again was like going back and excavating a part of that road.

Holy Hierarch Æþelgár, Archbishop of Canterbury

Hyde Abbey, Winchester, England

Today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate Æþelgár, the holy Archbishop of Canterbury who succeeded Saint Dúnstán in that office. Saint Æþelgár was of the generation of saints directly subsequent to the English Benedictine Reform inaugurated by Dúnstán, Æþelwold and Ósweald. He may thus be considered among the first of the spiritual fruits of this reform, and one of the worthy workmen also in the vineyard planted by his predecessors.

Of Saint Æþelgár’s early life we know little. He was born in the first half of the tenth century. He was a monk first at Glastonbury under Dúnstán, and then at Abingdon under Æþelwold to assist in its rebuilding after having been destroyed by the Danes. In this task Æþelgár acquitted himself admirably.

Having been raised from his youth under the Benedictine Rule in its strictness under Dúnstán, Æþelgár subordinated his will to that of his abbot without question. His hagiographer surmises that Æþelgár shared his master Æþelwold’s passion for aggressive generosity and solidarity with the poor of Winchester. He was almost certainly at the abbot’s hand when Æþelwold broke up and sold the entirety of his abbey’s silver plate to alleviate a famine that was then ravaging the countryside. Æþelwold reasoned that the Church, if reduced to poverty, would again be enriched; but that it was not in the power of man to restore the life of even one of God’s beloved poor, and thus it was the job of the Church to ensure their survival.

Æþelgár’s rigorous mode of asceticism and his upright life endeared him particularly to his abbot, whose severe and meticulous personality he shared. Such was the impression he made upon Saint Æþelwold, that the holy hierarch appointed Æþelgár to become abbot of the newly-reformed Benedictine house of Newminster (or Hyde) in Winchester – an institution mentioned in An Excellent Mystery by Edith Pargeter as having been burned in the civil war between Stephen and Maud.

There, Æþelwold had pursued a ruthless and even quite cruel policy of evicting the sæcular canons from the house – often turning them out without ceremony and without support – and replacing them with Benedictine monks from Abingdon. Æþelgár was not only one of these. He was appointed their abbot. There he undertook with great zeal to restore, rebuild and embellish the house, as well as open it radically to the poor of Winchester. With the support of his bishop, Abbot Æþelgár restored the roof of Hyde Abbey and built it into a fine tower ‘of great height and beauty, with a richly-carved ceiling’.

Æþelgár served as abbot of Newminster for 16 years before he was consecrated as Bishop of Selsey in 980, where he continued working vigorously for the reform of the Church. However, it appears that he did not take the extreme measures his former master had taken against sæcular canons and married priests in his see; he allowed them to continue serving the Church. In 988, on the occasion of the blessed repose of Archbishop Dúnstán, Æþelgár was chosen to be consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in his place; his hagiographer assumes that his appointment was political and an attempt to appease a newly-ascendant Benedictine Order by the appointment to high office of one of their own. His tenure as Archbishop was short – ‘no more than a year and three months’ before his own repose in the Lord on the thirteenth of February, 990.

During his time as Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Æþelgár received two letters from Benedictine houses in France – the houses of Saint-Vaast and Saint-Bertin there. Both letters congratulated him on his elevation to the archpastoral see. In the case of the first, Saint-Vaast requested that the relations between the Abbey and the English archbishopric would remain friendly; and in the case of the second, there was a request for financial aid from England. Saint Æþelgár was interred with his predecessors at Canterbury. Holy hierarch Æþelgár, pray to God for us sinners!

Venerable Gildas the Wise, Abbot of Rhuys

Saint Gildas of Rhuys

The twenty-ninth of January is also the feast-day of another great scholarly saint of the Orthodox Church, from as far west of Rome as Saint Frahât was as far east: Saint Gildas the Historian. Saint Gildas, who lived during the sixth century, was the foremost chronicler among the Britons of the fall of Roman Britain, and its invasion by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Gildas’s The Ruin and Conquest of Britain was a remarkable work of literature in its own right: a scathing indictment of the greed and misrule by Britain’s sub-Roman lords – one of whom happens to be, unfortunately, a distant ancestor of the Coopers. But it was also one of the primary sources for the early chapters of Saint Bede’s History of the English Church and People, and despite the two of them being on opposite sides of cultural and ecclesiological divides, Bede clearly had a high regard for his predecessor’s scholarly acumen.

Gildas was born in Alt Clut in Yr Hen Ogledd, ostensibly to Caw who was lord there between 495 and 501. He had four brothers. The Angles, who were attacking the Brythonic kingdoms of the Old North, drove Caw out of his kingdom and into Wales along with his brood, including Gildas. Gildas grew up in a sæcular vocation, married and fathered three sons – one of whom became the hermit Cenydd of Gower. He did, however, study with Saint Illtud when he was young, at the College of Saint Theodosius, where his fellow-pupils and friends included Saint Dewi, Saint Peulin and Saint Samson. It’s highly unlikely that our Saint Gildas is the same Gildas that prostrated himself before a pregnant Saint Non, as Dewi and Gildas the Wise were contemporaries. Saint Illtud loved Gildas, seeing in him the gifted scholar he had longed to become, and willed to teach him all manner of sæcular science and liberal arts, as well as the theological ones. Gildas himself, however, inclined toward the study of the Scriptures, and sought after the religious life.

Gildas and Samson were the two pupils of Illtud who helped the meek Saint Peulin to scare away the seagulls from Illtud’s crops. Fearing he would be blamed for allowing his master’s crop to be despoiled, Peulin asked for Gildas’s and Samson’s aid. After praying to God, the three boys were able to approach the gulls, who became tame and flightless in their presence, and were able to be herded like sheep to be penned in a barn. When Saint Illtud saw this, he wondered at his students’ faith, and commended them for it. Then he rebuked the birds and told them not to bother his crops again; they meekly obeyed.

When Gildas left Llanilltud Fawr it was to continue his studies in Ireland. He studied there from many masters and went from monastery to monastery collecting what wisdom he could from each, as a bee collects nectar to make honey. While living in Ireland he took orders to become a priest, and spent his time evangelising, teaching, healing and ministering to the poor in Armagh. He also at this time took upon himself an ascetic rule, which he kept to the end of his life: he ate only three meals a week, and betook himself to a strenuous schedule of vigils and prayers. At length, he was recalled to ‘the northern region of the isle of Britain’ (meaning Gwynedd and Powys in Wales) to preach against the paganism and Pelagianism that were then plaguing those regions. He was wildly successful in converting the northern Welsh to Christianity, who were attracted to his teaching in large part by his asceticism.

Saint Gildas was on good terms with his elder in Ireland, Saint Brigid of Kildare. The holy woman had been impressed by the studious youth and, when he had returned to Wales, sent to ask something of him that his service for Christ in Ireland might be remembered and venerated. Saint Gildas fashioned a metal bell with his own hands, and sent it back to Saint Brigid by the same messenger she had sent to him. She received it gladly and held the relic in reverence at her cloister.

The high king of Ireland, Ainmuire mac Sétnai, had also heard of the reputation of the learnèd and holy Saint Gildas, and sent an embassy to him begging him to come to Ireland again and minister to his people, who at that time were falling away from the correct doctrines. Gildas set sail once more for Ireland; and after he had made land, on the way to Tír Conaill he met a certain man afflicted with palsy, who had to go about on a hand-cart. Saint Gildas prayed to God and then knelt down to the man, bidding him rise and walk about on his feet. At once the man’s palsy was cured, and he stood up on two healthy feet, and reached out to the saint with two healthy arms. The man began to praise the name of Saint Gildas, but this earned a rebuke from the holy man, who told him instead that it was to Jesus Christ he ought to sing praises. But the man spread the name of Gildas about him all the same, such that Gildas was forced to flee from the sight of men and disappear into the Irish wilderness.

Saint Gildas was discovered by some who had known him from his first sojourn in Ireland, and they introduced him to the High King. From Tír Conaill Saint Gildas began to preach the true doctrines of Christ, and began patiently to explicate them to those who had inclined their ears to hæresy. By patient steps he began to instil the Orthodox faith in the hearts and minds of the Irish people. Saint Gildas set up a school, where he taught not only the sons of nobles, but also the landless and kinless poor. He even used what wealth was given him in gifts, to set free those who had been subject to slavery.

Towards the end of his earthly life, Saint Gildas went on pilgrimage. He chose to go to Rome, to visit the Tombs of the Apostles. He conducted several wondrous healings on the way, and sternly instructed the men he healed, not to give praises to him but instead to Christ by Whose power they were healed. His hagiography states that when he reached Rome, the citizens thereof were afflicted by the presence of a monstrous dragon with poisonous breath, which had already claimed the lives of many Romans. Gildas felled the wyrm with only his crozier and a prayer to God. Saint Gildas also spent some time in Ravenna and performed a notable healing there, restoring the sight and speech of a blind and mute man. He also fell among thieves on his journey back home, but passed through them unharmed by immobilising them with a prayer to God. He released them after he was safely delivered, but they fled from him – thieves would not plague that area for a long time afterward.

Saint Gildas longed to return home, but it was not to be – God had other plans. He made his way into Brittany, and found a suitable place for a hermitage on the Île de Houat in the Gulf of Morbihan, off the southern coast of the peninsula. He lived in solitude there for some time, but he earned a reputation among the local folk such that disciples were drawn to him. He went to the mainland, to Rhuys, and built for them an oratory near the mouth of the river Blavet, out of the outcrop of rock that jutted naturally from the bank. After the oratory he built a refectory and mill, as well as a hospital for the sick and a lazar-house. Travellers who visited Gildas and his disciples’ oratory were treated to great hospitality.

Gildas set himself up as the first abbot at Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, but his thought and sole concern in doing so was for the spiritual welfare of his disciple-monks. He placed himself in humility as the servant of all there. As for his teaching, ‘in his sermons, he exhorted men to atone for sins by alms, to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to visit the sick and those cast into prison, to bury the dead, to return evil for evil to no man, to love fasting, to be always assiduous in watchings and prayers.’ And in these things he led first by example and did not lay upon his disciples burdens he would not bear himself. In this way he passed the rest of his earthly life, and he reposed in the Lord in peace among his brothers, around the year 570.

On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, apart from a few epistolary fragments the sole surviving example of Gildas’s scholarly work, was written when Gildas was much younger, though he was almost assuredly living abroad at the time he wrote – probably in Ireland. Our knowledge of much of Britain’s history after the end of Roman rule there derives from Gildas – as well as our knowledge of the Christian Church in Britain under Roman rule. But even from this document Gildas’s profound erudition is evident enough. He alludes not only to the Holy Scriptures but also to the Æneid of Vergil and works of Platonic philosophy, as well as to patristic writings extant in both Latin and Greek. A particularly telling testament to Gildas’s reputation as a historian is this. The cautious Saint Bede, who in the History of the English Church and People ordinarily takes pains to cross-reference all the events and personages he describes between multiple sources and especially primary sources if he can, cites Gildas’s On the Ruin in large sections (particularly on the history of Christianity in Roman Britain) as his sole source, without question. On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain is preserved at the University of Cambridge.

Saint Gildas is remembered with fondness in Wales, Ireland and Brittany; the centre of his cultus is naturally enough at Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys. He has a holy well near Laniscat (as well as a menhir) and another near Magoar in the Côtes d’Armor, and yet another in Finistère in Brittany. He also had a shrine at Glastonbury Abbey, and has a church dedicated to his memory in Rosneath, Scotland. Wise and venerable abbot Gildas, meek friend of the poor and thundering chastiser of the proud and powerful, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Truly thou art surnamed ‘the Wise’, O righteous Gildas,
For in thy monastic solitude
Thou didst use thy God-given gift of words for His greater glory.
Teach us to despise nothing, that all our talents, however small
May be employed in God's service, for the salvation of our souls.

Abbaye Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, Morbihan, Brittany