Saint Cyril of Jerusalem and the poverty of philosophy

St Cyril of Jerusalem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So then, where can we turn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, he comes to the conclusion that

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

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

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

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

What is commanded thee: think thereupon. Amen.

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

ATTN: philosophers

Attention, philosophers.

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

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

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

You. Are. Done.

Go home.

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

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

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

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

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

Yinxu on the Mississippi——密西西比河边殷墟

As mentioned in my blog post about Ulysses S Grant yesterday, I got to visit Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site together with my in-laws. Cahokia. Immense, monumental ancient step-pyramids and earthen mounds that date back a thousand years… right at the southern tip of the American Midwest.

Cahokia, located just on the other side of the Mississippi River from St Louis, in Illinois, is a thousand-year-old archaeological site consisting of a number of large raised earthen structures, as well as the remnants of a wooden stockade and a ‘Woodhenge’—a now-reconstructed ring of 49 wooden posts which archaeologists believe to have functioned as an immense solar calendar, used to calculate the equinoxes. Monks Mound is the largest pyramid north of the Mexican border, with a base measuring 13 acres in area (equal to the Great Pyramid at Giza), 955 feet across and 775 feet wide, and currently reaching a height of 100 feet.

The Cahokia Mounds were the site of a massive urban settlement between the years 900 and 1350 AD. From the archaeological evidence it can clearly be seen to have been a thriving centre of trade, with a distinct social hierarchy, metalworking and sophisticated astronomical and agricultural methods. (Woodhenge attests to the astronomical sophistication, as does the fact that the mounds and the plaza are constructed in an ‘hourglass’ shape bounded by two strict east-west lines of construction.) It could thus be said with ease, that the middle Mississippian polity which built and lived among the mounds was a civilisation in the true sense of the word.

It was a fascinating experience to walk in the shadows of the mounds… and then to climb Monks Mound with its sweeping vistas. There is something truly numinous about standing in Cahokia, a kind of awe that I have only twice or thrice felt before in my life: at the Yinxu Archaeological Site in Anyang; at Tianzi Jia Liu in Luoyang; and standing inside the old city walls in Luoyang and Xi’an. This is not the same as religious awe, the sense of standing in the presence of the Divine. For that, I go to Divine Liturgy, or pray before icons of Christ and His Mother. It is a very different, very human and this-worldly sort of awe—the sense of standing on a spot that you knew (not just felt, or fancied, but knew) that others had stood, three, five, ten thousand years before you. Call it civilisational awe.

It is standing in just such places—yea, even in places where mass human sacrifice was conducted—that one begins to understand what Konstantin Leont’ev understood in between the lines of his philosophical and medical writings. Cultures are alive; they have life-cycles. And even when they pass out of earthly existence and memory, they leave traces behind them that one can’t help but feel. However much our modern sensibilities, our religious and humanitarian scruples (which have been not so much earned on our own merits as entailed upon us by bitter experience of past ages), might turn back upon us at the contemplation of a civilisation perpetuating itself through the infliction of violent ritual death upon its own… there is nonetheless something truly splendid and grandiose about it, a kind of stoic and sanguine beauty which pervades the remains.

It was fascinating to walk amid this ancient monument, this millennium-old testament left by a pre-contact Indigenous civilisation, together with three Chinese people who are very near and dear to me. What was interesting in particular to me was how close the ancient sites of their own intimate knowledge were to the fore of their minds as we walked together.

Their first thought, also, was to liken the place to Yinxu, and also to the Bingmayong. The cruelty—the picturesque cruelty, the cruelty of fell beauty—of a Shang state perpetuated by mass human sacrifice, or of the First Qin Emperor who built a great Wall partly with the blood and bones of the men that he ruled, posed a ready parallel to what one might see at Mound 72. Hundreds of virgin maidens, exquisitely arrayed in marine shells, and then slain and arrayed at the southernmost point of the complex, their remains aligned in perfect reverence with the cardinal directions, the eternal tracks of sun and moon and season, giving life and death in their turn…

And what right have we, we shallow and arrogant children, we neonates in the grand scheme, to pass judgement upon this civilisation or those who inherited it? What do we know of what is sacred, or of what is true or what is correct? What price have we paid for that knowledge? Let’s give Nietzsche his due and acknowledge it: nowhere close to a price high enough, assuredly. Today we palefaces wax sentimental and lachrymose over the fate of the idealised Native American, with his fading ethic of spiritual and environmental harmony… yet we have no deep understanding by what route, by what autochthonous root in fact, the Indigenous peoples of this continent have come to such an ethic.

The stately, bloody grandeur of the Cahokia Mounds, even in its ruined current state, speaks still in resounding echoes of its former colossal resplendence, followed by its equally titanic collapse… this was the price, these were the conditions under which the Dakota and their cousin-nations learned what wisdom they still hold about the necessity of humility in the face of nature, about the need to honour one’s connectedness to others before the Creator. And the ancestors of the Lakota and Dakota, of the Kansa and Ponca, of the Ho-Chunk, the Choctaw and the Creek—they earned that wisdom, and carefully tended it down the generations, easily over 150 years before the white man ever laid eyes on the silver banks of the Mississippi.

The posited prehistoric connexions between the Han Chinese and the Indigenous peoples of this continent may be vastly overstated. But what is true, is that the Chinese civilisation and the heirs to the Cahokian civilisation (let’s not be coy and pretend that we don’t know who they are, or that they aren’t still with us today), share a great deal in common, when it comes to having dealt with the life-cycle of their civilisations. Let’s not whitewash those similarities, and still less downplay them or sentimentalise them or moralise them. Let us face them as they are.

If these ruminations on Cahokia strike one as too pre-Christian, too radical-reactionary, too culturally-maximalist, too elegiac of premodern brutality—in short, too Leont’evian—good. I want people to feel at least a glimmer of the mingled discomfort and awe that I felt as I led my feet and legs carefully along the tended paths, between and among the mortuary grounds and the hallowed heights of those ancient mounds.

Russia, Palestine and ‘moral equivalence’

I.

With regard to the war in Ukraine, I’m in a relatively strange position. When the most recent phase of the war began in February 2022, I was firmly opposed to Russia’s incursion, though I reserved a series of criticisms of the Ukrainian government with an eye to the injustices against Russophone Ukrainians and ethnic minorities in places like Bukovina and Transcarpathia which preceded it. My reasons for opposing the Russian war effort were, in retrospect, perhaps a trifle naïve. I thought the initial attack by Russia against Kharkov was inhumane and inexcusable, given that Kharkov was the site where Russophone Ukrainians first came under violent attack from the Ukrainian SBU back in April of 2014.

Later events and revelations caused me to significantly revise my stance. Whereas before I was critically pro-Ukraine in the current conflict for principled anti-war reasons, I am now critically pro-Russia… for principled anti-war reasons. I still think that the Russian armed forces have made significant strategic errors and tactical bungles in the prosecution of the war, and that the political leadership has been… inconsistent. But several factors caused me to change my view. Firstly, there were the revelations from Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Baud that western nations were conducting military exercises in the Black Sea and that the Ukrainian military were ramping up attacks on Donbas before 24 February 2022. Secondly, there were the Russian peace proposals in April of 2022 that the Western bloc, and the United Kingdom in particular, did their level best to scupper. Thirdly, there were the striking admissions by high-ranking European and American officials such as Angela Merkel and François Hollande, that the West never intended to abide by the Minsk Agreements but instead use them as a time-buying pretext to arm Kiev for war.

Although none of these three reasons by itself constitutes a valid casus belli for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (at least, in light of Western Christian just war theory), when taken together as a pattern, they cast Russia’s actions in an entirely different light. Russia was acting in response to a series of premeditated, offensive provocations from the West. And Russia had attempted numerous times to come to a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. These factors convinced me that Russia’s actions were in fact defensive rather than offensive, and that the Ukrainian nation as a whole had been grievously abused by the Western bloc, and made to serve as a catspaw to advance Western plans to weaken and compromise Russia’s political process and territorial integrity. Basically, everything the West accused Russia of doing to Ukrainian society, the West was actually doing (or planning to do) to Russian. I think it is fair to say that my previous critically pro-Ukrainian position was already being revised by July, and was already critically pro-Russian by January of this year.

I can still understand and sympathise, to a limited degree, with the attitude of anti-war moral outrage over the February 2022 Russian incursion. After all, I shared in it! But, as the great British economist John Maynard, Baron Keynes, is often famously credited with saying: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind, sir—what do you do?’ Just as the first impressions of Elizabeth Bennet of Mr Darcy and Mr Wickham had to be revised as enough of the facts became known to her and pointed to an entirely different interpretation and colouring of events and circumstances, so I too all but had to revise my position concerning the events of February 2022.

I also began to notice, in the prosecution of the ‘special military operation’, that Russia’s tactics and overall military doctrine were aimed not at territorial conquest at all costs, but instead at the degradation of Ukrainian military capacity and the protection (insofar as possible) of civilian lives. This was clearly not owing to Russian military weakness and strategical stupidity, but owing to an active choice on the part of the Russian chiefs of staff. Inexcusable high-profile incidents such as Bucha notwithstanding (and in the awareness that a full-scale impartial investigation has yet to be conducted), the Russian armed forces have taken great pains to remove civilian populations from positions of physical danger, and direct their attacks as exclusively as possible at military targets—most of these being along the line of contact.

As of four days ago, the UN Human Rights Office has reported that over the past 20 months, 10,000 civilians have been killed in the Russo-Ukrainian War. This sounds like a lot, and indeed there can be no moral excuse for such death as in any modern war. But for a modern armed conflict, Russia is actually incurring a comparatively low rate of civilian deaths. For comparison: the Iraq Body Count project (which is in fact probably a severe underestimate of civilian deaths) showed that American servicemen were responsible for over 20,000—twice as many—confirmed Iraqi civilian deaths across a similar period of time. (And the Iraq War was in fact a war of choice, and no such tragic conflict of two nations’ defensive claims as the Russo-Ukrainian War is!)

It is also worth noting that there is no active armed resistance to speak of against Russian rule inside the territories that Russia is occupying. There are a handful of far-right neo-Nazi Russian paramilitaries and criminal groups associated with the so-called ‘Irpin Declaration’ in armed opposition to the Russian government. But these seem to operate exclusively out of Ukrainian-controlled territory and enjoy practically zero support in Russian-controlled Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhzh’e and Kherson oblasts. A critical thinker is forced to wonder why this is. If Russia really were behaving as the brutal, imperialistic, homicidal territorial aggressor so commonly portrayed, then why are the civilians in the territories it controls acquiescing to Russian rule so passively and meekly? Why not take up arms against the oppressor?

II.

This context also formed in large part my attitude toward the current war being waged by Israel against Gaza. To engage in any analysis of this conflict is to step into a rhetorical minefield. This is because the Cold War-relic snarl-phrase of ‘moral equivalence’ is again being bandied about with great abandon over the past month and a half, notably by Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Jonathan Tobin, Alan Dershowitz and other such liberast luminaries. Condemnations of ‘moral equivalence’ in this context are very nearly equivalent to a ‘how dare you!!’ non-argument. It’s almost an emotive reflex, to the effect of: How dare you liken us enlightened ones, us democratic and human-rights-respecting heroes, to those unspeakable and irredeemable villains, terrorists, baby-killers and death-cultists over there?

The first and foremost philosophical problem with condemning ‘moral equivalence’, in fact a huge problem on its face, is that all moral reasoning relies to some degree on drawing analogies between disparate situations such that certain equivalencies can be meaningfully derived. Practically all systems of ethics in Western thought going back to Plato and Aristotle rely at their basis on analogical arguments and reasoning. Plato in particular was famous for using analogies (‘the divided line’), parables (the Charioteer, the Cave, the Man chained to a Lion and a Many-Headed Beast) and even myths (Atlantis, the Ring of Gyges) to draw the characters of his dramas—and with them, his readers—into a deeper understanding of the particular point of virtue or knowledge that he was exploring. Plato’s discursive methods were formalised into a system by his student-cum-rival Aristotle.

In a very real sense, all serious moral thinking in the West is an exercise in drawing equivalences, and the ‘how-dare-you’ demand to cease drawing such analogical equivalences is tantamount to demanding that we turn off our brains and toss out the very fundaments of Western ethical thought. In this case, a fortiori, the need for meaningful analogies, and a cogent language for evaluating such analogies, is paramount. For example: I note that these same talking-heads condemning ‘moral equivalence’ seem to have no objections to the rather spurious moral equivalence of Palestinians to Nazis that the Israeli authorities are wont to engage in.

Now, it should be obvious from this example that some analogies are better, closer and more cogent than others. The benefit of accepting equivalency and analogy as a valid method of moral reasoning, is that we are better equipped to say which equivalencies and analogies are invalid. The Germans during the Second World War were in command of their own state, for one thing. The Palestinians have no state. And they have a ‘government’ only in the most risibly loose of senses. The Germans had control over an entire financial sector, an entire industrial war machine, a command structure, including an air force, that the Palestinians completely lack. And, probably most importantly, the Germans were also driven by an ideology of racial superiority and social Darwinism, which, for reasons which should be obvious, holds no endogenous currency whatsoever among the Arabs of Palestine.

Regarding the neologism of ‘Islamofascism’, a coinage which circulates promiscuously among the same people who snarl against ‘moral equivalence’, the following must be said. We must speak of the Ikhwânism of Ḥamâs on its own demerits, and these are very real. It is disgusting beyond words that the Ḥamâs leadership lives like kings in places like Dubai and Doha while the Palestinian constituency they supposedly govern gets bombed to hell. But, while Ikhwânism may bear comparison to fascism in some respects, fascism is in a very real sense secular and nationalistic, in a way that even the most brutal and death-loving forms of Islamism are not.

III.

But, having established foremost the need for ‘moral equivalencies’ (in the most basic sense of simply having an analogical method for ethical comparison), I think it may be possible to begin to discuss the parallels between the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and the Israeli-Palestinian one a bit more cogently. Hopefully a more convincing case can be put forward than Biden’s senile and inchoate conflation of Russia and Ḥamâs as fellow-dastards and enemies of all that is good and decent.

Three such equivalencies, between Russia and Israel, do rise immediately to the surface.

1. Fraternal conflict.The Israelis and the Palestinians, much like the Ukrainians and the Russians, are quite literally brother-peoples.
   
   Israelis and Palestinians have been shown by objective genetic studies to share recent ancestry. Both Palestinians and Israelis are largely Semitic peoples with roots in the Levant.
   
   Likewise, all of the East Slavic peoples—Ukrainians, Belarusians and ethnic Russians—share ‘almost identical proportions’ of Caucasian and Northern European genetic material, making them incredibly close kin simply from the standpoint of heredity.


2. Defensive justifications. The Israeli case for war is, on its face, similar to the Russian one—insofar as it is justified on the basis of self-defence and security against not merely local but also regional foes.
   
   In Russia’s case, those regional foes are the eastern European nations which are members of the NATO bloc; while in Israel’s case, those regional foes are the Arab nations with which it hasn’t yet come to a modus vivendi.


3. Territorial occupation. It must be mentioned that in each case, Russia and Israel in the prosecution of their respective wars hold and occupy territory that, under international law, does not belong to them.
   
   Russia occupies much of the Donetsk Basin, Zaporozhzh’e and Kherson in defiance of international law. Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza in defiance of the same international laws.

However, there also arise a number of dissimilarities between the two conflicts; mostly historical in their import, though not irrelevant to the current situation in each country.

1. Religious significance. Palestine is very literally holy ground to all three of the major Abrahamic religions. The Temple Mount, the Tombs of the Patriarchs, the site of Christ’s Nativity, the Holy Sepulchre, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives—all exist within the borders of the present Holy Land. There has historically been massive contention over these sites, both among Christian confessions and between Christians, Jews and Muslims.
   
   The Pontic territories under dispute do contain religious significance for Orthodox Christians. Sevastopol in particular is a place sacred in Russian Orthodoxy, as the site of the baptism of St Vladimir. But there is nothing in Crimea or elsewhere in the territories under dispute between Russia and the Ukraine, which qualitatively resembles in character the holy sites in Palestine.


2. Settler colonialism. The presence of Russophones in the Ukraine is not, in overall terms, the result of a deliberate concerted policy of colonialism or settlement—even though Tsarist Russia, and later the Soviet Union, did have deliberate policies of colonial settlement in numerous other places. By contrast, Israeli history is very overtly and self-consciously colonial and settlement-oriented: the main organisation for Jewish settlement was literally called the Jewish Colonisation Association; Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky both explicitly framed their project in terms of colonisation.
   
   Ironically, the use of ‘postcolonial’ discourse to describe modern Ukrainian reality is not endogenous but rather a postmodern (and post-Soviet) borrowing from the West… and this discursive strategy is, to put it mildly, broadly unconvincing to the actual former subjects of Western colonial governments, who (not without reason) see this discursive strategy as self-serving and driven by ulterior interests.


3. Social segregation. The people who now live in the Donetsk Basin are, by and large, the descendants of the same Don Cossacks that had independently lived among and intermarried with the locals since the seventeenth century. Rates of intermarriage between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine have historically been high enough that Russians and Ukrainians in the Ukrainian East are functionally the same people. No formal segregation policies have separated ethnic Ukrainians from ethnic Russians in the past, neither under the Tsars, nor under the Soviet government, nor under the current Russian Federation.
   
   By contrast, segregation in Israel has been legal and formalised since its founding. Intermarriages are vanishingly rare between Israelis and Palestinians, and the Israeli state actually erects legal barriers as well as physical ones in order to prevent it.


4. Economic disparity. There has historically been very little difference between residents of Ukrainian territories and residents of Russian territories in terms of wealth, even going back to Tsarist times. Certain politically-charged famines notwithstanding, Ukrainians were overall about as well-off as Russians throughout most of their history together. The recent disparity between overall Ukrainian wealth and overall Russian wealth has more to do with the policies chosen by their respective governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the disastrous shock-therapy of the 1990s, Russia turned toward a mixed economic policy based on self-reliance and food security; while the Ukrainian government largely remained mired in Western neoliberalism with all its attendant ills.
   
   The marked disparity between Israeli wealth and Palestinian wealth, by contrast, is the product of deliberate design rather than negligence or happenstance. The Palestinians were not only driven off the land they had once owned, but they were directly plundered of their resources of all sorts, by both legal chicanery and outright burglary, under Israeli administration. This was the case both in the 1948 Nakba, and in the wake of 1967.


5. Violent resistance. Both Ukraine and Palestine do have histories of violent resistance, though these are different in character. Ukraine has witnessed sporadic uprisings against Tsarist rule; it resisted incorporation into the Soviet Union during and after the First World War; and Ukrainian nationalists fought in the Nazi SS against the Soviets during the Second World War. Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule was largely politically rightist and middle- and upper-class in terms of class base, being motivated largely by nineteenth-century nationalist ideas.
   
   By contrast, there has been armed resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian land practically since the very beginning. Palestinians of all social classes began fighting back against the expropriation of their land and the expulsion of their people almost immediately after 1948, and again repeatedly through the Intifadas. The Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and displacement has been ideologically diverse: ranging from left-wing Marxist-Leninist (PFLP) through secular-liberal (Fataḥ, Third Way) to right-wing Islâmist (Ḥamâs).
   
   Currently there is no real resistance movement to speak of against Russian rule inside the territories it occupies. (The aforementioned Irpin-aligned groups operate within Ukrainian territory and with Ukrainian state support.) Though one may (and should!) deplore Ḥamâs’s ideology and its methods, the fact of its very existence points to the adverse conditions under which Palestinians live, and the continued determination of Palestinians to resist their occupiers. Clearly these conditions of life are not mirrored in Donbass, Zaporozhzh’e or Kherson.


6. Avoidance of civilian casualties. In the present conflicts, there are clear distinctions in the treatment of civilians in war. The best UN estimates of civilian death toll in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict since February 2022 sit right around 10,000; 545 of whom are children. This is over a time period of 20 months. These deaths are not to be minimised in terms of the moral harm done; however, as noted above, Russian forces have been demonstrably willing to sacrifice territorial gains and forward momentum on the battlefield precisely in order to avoid placing civilians in harm’s way.
   
   By contrast, over the past 7 weeks, Israeli forces have already killed 13,000 civilians; about 5,300 of whom are children. This comes from a deliberate military policy of targeting civilian areas and humanitarian infrastructure with shells and air strikes.

IV.

In drawing these parallels, and showing points of similarity and dissimilarity between the conflicts in Gaza and in the Ukrainian East, it is not my primary intention to make a simple and straightforward case of ‘Russia good; Israel bad’—even if one of my secondary intentions was indeed to complicate President Biden’s (and the US State Department’s, and that of the ‘moral equivalence’-shouters) narrative of ‘Russia bad; Israel good’. I have neither the desire nor the inclination to hide or hedge about my sympathy for the Palestinian cause… or my comparative lack of sympathy for the Ukrainian one. But I equally have no desire to fall into a ‘how dare you!!’ trap of my own. There are numerous complexities and tragic historical contingencies to both conflicts that render any such Manichæan interpretation analytically worthless.

In the case of Palestine in particular, no historical reckoning can be complete without a thorough accounting for Western Europe’s colonial designs on the region after the Ottoman collapse, or for its inexcusable and genocidal crimes against European Jewry during the Shoah which lent new urgency to the Zionist plea. And in the case of the Ukrainian problem, one has to navigate the disparate experiences of the Galician west, the maritime south and the industrial Russophone East, and the attempts they did make to live together in peace in the wake of independence. There one also has to navigate the problems of debt politics and the legacy of the same European genocide.

In leaving off this analysis, I think the only truly proper thing to do is to lift it up to the Most High, in Whose hands justice is complete and not partial, and in Whose ultimate reckoning all things will be given their proper place and due, and before Whose Truth I hope I dare not exalt the fruits of my own reasoning or prejudices as rivals.

Collected aphoristic thoughts and quotes on Palestine

All thoughts are my own unless quoted otherwise.

I honestly think that for most people, they simply parrot [about the conflict] what their favoured media outlets tell them to, and CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo and WSJ all tell them the same thing... with some surface-level permutations based on domestic political / cultural / tribal alignment. God forbid we should read actual books about each region’s history and the roots of each conflict, instead of just regurgitating easily-digestible headlines, op-ed columns and talking-head takes.

~~~

One thing that Vladimir Solovyov got very much right in War, Progress and the End of History, is that there is a kind of falsehood, a deep moral obscenity, in those who preach non-violence to the powerless, from a position of safety and security.

The argument between the General and the Prince in the first conversation was over the Armenians in the late 1800s, but equally so I think it could apply to the Palestinians today.

~~~

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French.

- Mahatma Gandhi

~~~

We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

- Nelson Mandela

~~~

It’s tragic that so many people are made unable to tell the difference between “explanation”, “justification”, and “apologia”. Often, those things are conflated on purpose with the help of the media to prevent/shut down any civilised discussion around certain subjects.

- Denis Vladimirovich

~~~

A few assorted thoughts. Not all of them are completely consistent with each other, but so be it.

1. All war is bad on all sides.
2. Some casus belli are more just than others.
3. Few conflicts have stable solutions (this side of Parousia).
4. Still fewer conflicts have obvious solutions.
5. That does not mean we (individually and collectively) shouldn't look for solutions.
6. No one who isn't in a position of power should be expected to have the solutions.

~~~

Imagine engaging in abstruse academic debates about dogmatic vs. hopeful universalism as Gaza burns.

~~~

To have empathy is not to assert power or to take revenge. It is to feel broken with those who have been broken—and if you are a follower of Jesus, which, de facto, we are not, is to be broken with them.

- Fr Marc Boulos

~~~

My hope and prayer is to be a source of light, and not darkness. Let’s be honest: this pain we’re all feeling isn’t specific to this moment; it’s ongoing. The truth is that for me, for my family, for Palestinians: this is life.

- Mo Amer

~~~

Enough oppression against the Palestinian people! Peace does not come from the bodies of children, killed people, innocent people, and women. Peace comes when the decision-makers in this world realize that our people have dignity, as all the peoples of the world. We are not advocates of war, we reject violence and killing, and we are seekers of peace, but at the same time, we seek justice and have a right that we will not give up.

- His Holiness Patriarch John X (Yazigi) of Antioch

~~~

In the Middle East, the net effects [of European cultural hysteria] are:

1. that Europe is burdened with the heavy baggage of interventions that inflame Muslim hostility toward the West, and
2. to create the psychological imperative to find some way to assuage their own sense of guilt by finding, and magnifying, the sins of their victims.

- Dr Michael Brenner

~~~

Moral discourse in the West has degraded so far that even the most basic calls for justice and humanity are considered to be Marxist, subversive or terroristic.

~~~

The descent to evil. “Do unto others what you would like them to do to you” has increasingly been replaced by “Do unto others the evil they did to you”, and even by “Do to others the evils before they might do it to you.”

- Fr John D’Alton

~~~

As an Orthodox Christian leftist with Semitic ancestry, I have two questions.

1. By what moral logic are the Arabs supposed to shoulder 80 years of responsibility, at the cost of their lives and their homes, for the crimes of Hitler?
2. By what moral logic are Palestinian Christians supposed to shoulder responsibility, at the cost of their lives and their homes, for the recent crimes of Hamas?

The synodal religious type: two perspectives

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

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

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

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

These things are not enough. Test yourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portrait of a monk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously upset, the Staretz said:

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

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

The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance.

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

And again:

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thirty-five.’

‘Did you ever hear me criticise anyone?’

‘No.’

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

Disconcerted, Father M replied shamefacedly:

‘Forgive me.’

‘God will forgive.’

And yet again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Skidelskys: toward a theory of satiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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