Hope and false hope: a riposte to Sebastian Milbank

As a student of Russian history, I want to take the opportunity here to respond to an article by Sebastian Milbank in the Critic. Although much better-intentioned and prima facie far more reasonable-sounding than most articles of its type these days, this article still unfortunately manages to exemplify certain tendencies of wishful thinking and misunderstanding of Russia that typifies the Atlanticist establishment discourse on that country. Milbank writes:

Despite the flood of opinion and attention directed towards the war between Russia and Ukraine, very few in the West, including many policy-makers, really understand the depth and complexity of the history involved.

Truer words were never spoken, and this especially holds true for think-tank denizens like Michael McFaul and Anders Åslund, who have been busy on cable news and Twitter firing off (and then occasionally attempting to retract, when shown to have… to say the least… unfortunate ramifications) historically-illiterate hot takes like gunslingers in a John Woo cop flick. However, although Milbank’s footwork in attempting to understand that history is commendable, he doesn’t quite do enough of it to exonerate himself completely from his own charge. Continuing with Milbank’s article:

Putin’s 5000 word essay on [Russian and Ukrainian shared history]… reveals the sophistication and historical scale of Russian thinking on the subject… it is that marriage of strategic and historic vision with rapacious gangsterism that has seen Putin succeed so often at frustrating western expectations.

I will here reiterate what I have said previously on the subject of this assault. From a moral standpoint, it is inexcusable, full stop. The invasion of the Ukraine was wrong, and Putin bears responsibility. Speaking from a personal standpoint, it is negatively impacting the lives of several people I know and care about deeply. In light of this, however, I also believe that the Atlantic alliance’s hybrid-war tactics of blanket sanctions on necessities targetting civilians, while at the same time making weapons sales to an ill-disciplined and bigoted Ukrainian military are making the situation worse than it already is (as it usually does when we consider the sort of campaigns NATO usually wages). However, at least at first, Putin represented a turn away from ‘rapacious gangsterism’ under Yeltsin, and the heights of ‘greed and violence’ not only in Russia’s government but in its shattered society, which had been encouraged by the West throughout the 1990s in the name of free-market reform.

But about those ‘Western expectations’ Milbank drops in at the end… I am also going to speak to those in my conclusion. These ‘expectations’, insofar as they are bad-faith, insurmountable expectations, seem to lie at the root of a lot of the paranoia with which Russia and Russians currently tend to view the world.

The essay spoke of “three Russias”… Putin is not just blowing hot air when he describes Ukraine as an artificial concept… he refers to a unitary medieval Russian “state” that was torn apart through internal conflict and external invasion, and was laboriously put back together through the conflicts that built the Russian Empire…

It would be well, first of all, to acknowledge where the ‘three Russias’ concept in Putin’s essay came from, and the long history it has in the cultured forms of Russian political philosophy which embraced human dignity and pluralism. The clearest and most influential (at least in modern times) articulation of the ‘three Russias’ theory came in the form of GP Fedotov’s work on the Russian religious mind. Fedotov’s threefold typology of Russian spirituality (which he considered to be upstream of political culture) does present some problems, but is worth reading precisely for this reason: he helps to deflate some of the caricatures of the ‘three Russias’ (in his case referring to Kiev, Moscow and Novgorod), some of which Milbank seems to fall into here.

Putin’s actual essay is, likewise, far more nuanced than Milbank makes it out to be. He fully acknowledges the decentralisation of political power within the Kievan Rus’ (or, in his usage, ‘Ancient Rus’’) polity. He primarily cites the Tale of Bygone Years (a.k.a. the Primary Chronicle) to further his argument for a unified state; however, Putin could equally, and more effectively, have cited the Tale of Igor’s Armament, which dates to the early 13th century. In the 1200s, the anonymous poet who wrote Igor’s Armament was already lamenting the loss of brotherly feeling and unified leadership among the Rus’ principalities. That would better seem to justify the idea that, at one time, the Rus’ polity did have both of these political goods.

But if the deep history of Russia complicates Ukrainian nationalism, it equally complicates Russian nationalism. Like German nationalism, they are the product of romantic 19th century historiography, whose purpose was as much to construct as to discover a national history…

First of all, this strikes me as rather high-handed coming from someone with a historical view of his own country that is clearly deeply coloured by 19th century Romantic myths. Sebastian clearly and, indeed, commendably loves William Wordsworth, and calls for a ‘folk revival’ of the national myth in his own country to counter the pernicious effects of capitalism and urbanisation. Those are all good things, to my mind. But to then turn around and fault other countries for having similar national self-understandings based on Romantic 19th-century historiography seems rather… self-unaware, to say the least. There is nothing uniquely pernicious about Romanticism in Russia that separates it from the English variant or ties it to later völkisch German perversities, particularly when Russian Romantics like Khomyakov looked explicitly to England rather than to Germany for inspiration.

Second, let’s be real. All history is invention, insofar as it consists not of disconnected facts jumbled together helter-skelter, but instead employs a consistent hermeneutic strategy. Though all decent and responsible history must be answerable to fact, it must also be ordered. And all decent and responsible history furthermore consists in a personal engagement with and interrogation of these ordered facts. Now, nationalist histories may be (and usually are) indecent and irresponsible; but merely pointing to their inspirations and origins and the fact that they are histories rather than mere chronicle betrays an intolerable post-modernist scepticism that is always already selective while pretending to be otherwise.

One of the reasons Kiev draws the hostile and covetous attention of the rulers of Moscow is that Ukraine represents, however nascently and potentially, an alternative vision of Russian identity and politics to that of Putin and his cohorts.

Here is where we leave the realm of history and begin to enter the realm of wishful thinking.

That Putin is a nationalist is not in question. Saying his view of Russian history is thereby distorted and errant is perfectly defensible.

However, to claim that Kiev is the target of Moscow’s political-cultural envy on account of its ‘alternative vision of Russian identity and politics’ is a remarkable form of projection. It’s the functional equivalent of American nationalists claiming in the wake of 11 September that the terrorists ‘hate us for our freedom’. With very few exceptions, the Ukrainian political experience from 1990 to the present, with its sky-high wealth inequality, endemic and flagrant government corruption, risible law enforcement and constant careening from one bloody political crisis to the next, has been nothing that any Russian statesman, least of all Putin, has any desire to emulate (or, more accurately, return to).

11th century Kievan Rus was not a “state”, and even by the standards of medieval kingdoms it tended towards heterogeneity and decentralisation... Nor was it an ethnic unity.

Ironically, in Ukrainian nationalist discourse, particularly since 2014, this acknowledged ethnic diversity of Great Russia is precisely what makes it undesirable. Ukrainian nationalists, fancying themselves as the true inheritors of a pure Rus’ bloodline, are quick to point to the mixed heritage of, say, Saint Andrei Bogolyubskii as proof of the mongrel Tatar and Volga Finnic heritage of Muscovy. By the way, I fully agree with Milbank that this made Saint Andrei more in keeping with the diversity of historical Ancient Rus’, rather than less. But on balance this fact does not serve his argumentative point about Ukrainian nationhood being any kind of enviable alternative for Russia as a whole.

As to the Viking heritage of the Rus’ ruling class; again, this is on its face an unobjectionable fact. However, again, I do not think this fact alone serves the point which he wants it to serve. If the Viking ruling-class element was merely one among many sources of the Rus’ identity, then does it make much sense at all to fault them as essentially defective Swedes in their later history, when additional waves of nomads from the east came to replace the Pechenegs and the Tatars?

Something resembling democracy flourished in many Russian cities, nowhere more so than Novgorod, the true Venice of the North, a great city-state in which the commons, the aristocracy and the clergy shared power, and where many positions (including that of the Archbishop) were subject to popular election...

First, for a point of clarity, the bishops within Milbank’s church, the Church of England, are not popularly elected, they are appointed. In the Roman Catholic Church, bishops are appointed as well; they are certainly not elected by the laity. Novgorod’s process of electing bishops was well outside the norm anywhere in Europe, not just in the Rus’ polities.

I am neither insensitive nor entirely immune to the pull of this semi-mythologised reading of Kievan Rus’ history. The reigns of Vladimir the Great and Yaroslav the Wise and Vladimir Monomakh, as well as the examples of the Martyr-Princes Boris and Gleb, are truly admirable examples of enlightened Christian rulership and law. However, Russian history is never as straightforward as it first appears, and there is often a heavy undercurrent of irony in it. First of which is the fact that Kievan Rus’ retained the institution of slavery, or, in the terminology of Rus’ times, kholopy (meaning ‘the help’, with overtones of servility).

Although landed peasants in Rus’ enjoyed this degree of dignity and freedom, landless peasants were not free in medieval Rus’, and indeed they were often treated like chattel. This was also an inheritance from pre-Christian Scandinavia, in the form of thralldom. The institution of kholopy only finally disappeared during the Muscovite period which is the focus of Milbank’s narrative of Russian decline. Its last gasp happened under the reformer-Tsar Aleksei the Quiet, notably during a period of political centralisation and concentration of power.

In his history of the Russian religious mind, Fedotov was quick to deflate this idea of Kiev long being this centre of an enlightened land of liberty governed by wise Christian philosopher-kings and lawgivers. In fact, much of his first volume can come across as quite harsh in its assessments of the way actual history showed the rulers of the various principalities to be a greedy, fractious, vengeful and conniving lot on the whole. It was the monks, the hermits and (in Moscow at least) the holy fools who tended to authentically bear witness to the magnanimous spirituality and Scandinavian openness of the post-baptismal Vladimir the Great.

Except that even here, Fedotov notes that the monks of Kiev and especially Galich had already fallen under the spell of a timocratic emphasis on honour and blood-vengeance that quickly eroded this humane inheritance. Vladimir (whose administrative core later drifted to Moscow) fared little better, with the monks adopting a cynical attitude of flattery toward their princes. Fedotov is clear in his preference for Novgorod, where the tradition of clergy and monastics speaking truth to power and embodying the Gospel seemed to have held out the longest.

However, Fedotov’s rosy view of a free, middle-class, proto-democratic medieval Novgorod, which Milbank here uncritically adopts, was already in need of substantial revision by the time the Soviet Union was on its way out. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, at the very beginning of his essay The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, points to the research of Siberia-exiled Russian historian Sergei Platonov in showing that Novgorod was in fact a vulgar oligarchy with few actual democratic procedures. Any democratic and independent yeoman-class tendencies in the Russian North arose after Novgorod’s fall to Moscow, rather than before. The grain of truth to Fedotov’s characterisation of Novgorod lies in his understanding of its inner spiritual character, which was in fact allowed to flourish independently in the wake of the fall of Novgorod’s oligarchy under a sort of benign neglect from Moscow in the years following. Again, this speaks to the thick layer of irony that underlies the historical experiences of Russian folk-democracy.

Moscow was an insignificant trading post, set amongst the vast forests that still cover much of the central belt of Russia today...

This is inaccurate. Moscow was indeed a natural point of trade, being located on the confluence of the Moscow and the Volga Rivers. But – as it was a natural meeting place for the diverse peoples Milbank mentions earlier (the Finnic Merya and Murom peoples, the Turkic Volga Tatars and Bolghars, and the Slavic Vyatich and Krivich peoples) – it was far from insignificant. It had been inhabited for centuries, even millennia, before its first mention in the Chronicle, with the first settlement dating back to the Neolithic. Archaeological evidence suggests the existence not only of herding and agriculture but also metal crafts and organised trade. It was not a key political capital, but it was considered important enough to need engineered defences (like a moat, the remains of which date back to roughly 1100). This idea that Kiev was an urban centre of civilised culture and Moscow a mere forest village, in addition to simply being factually wrong, plays into a modernist, nationalist narrative that militates against the idea of Rus’ being a diverse, peaceful or democratic polity.

Estimates vary, but this force killed over 1,500 high ranking figures in Novgorod alone during their most infamous massacre, and employed methods of torture and execution that were considered grisly even by the brutal standards of the time.

That is actually something of a lowball estimate, with Russian historians credibly laying between 2,000 and 12,000 total deaths at the feet of Ivan's oprichniki during his rule. But let us take a look at some of Ivan’s contemporaries in Western Europe for a fair comparison, if we are to speak in terms of Milbank’s ‘standards of the time’. The Duke of Alva, the viceroy of the Habsburgs in the Spanish Netherlands, was said to have tortured to death between 5,000 and 18,000 Dutch during his five-year tenure there, between 1567 and 1573. And on the other side of the religious equation, the monstrously bloody, misogynistic and monk-hating founder of the Church of England, Henry VIII, executed nearly 60,000 Englishmen over his 36-year reign (and women, too, to be fair - some of whom he happened to be married to at the time). The Massacre of Novgorod was indeed the most spectacularly gruesome episode in Muscovite history to that date, but we should be clear-eyed about the fact that Muscovy was far from sui generis in terms of its brutality, even ‘internal’ brutality. The fall of man being what it is, we should not be surprised at this.

A successful Ukrainian parliamentary state ruled from Kiev, uniting Catholics and Orthodox, Russian and Ukrainian speakers, looking to Constantinople rather than Moscow, offers an alternative model of what it is to be Russia.

In the immortal words of Luke Skywalker: ‘Impressive. Every word in that sentence was wrong.’

The Ukraine is ‘parliamentary’ only in the very loosest sense of the word. Since its independence in 1991 it has had only two successful orderly and peaceful transitions of power: the election of Viktor Yanukovych in 2010, and the election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019. The Ukraine’s HDI has remained pretty much stagnant over the past 10 years, and has consistently lagged behind Russia’s for that same period. The Catholics in the country tragically tend to despise the Orthodox. And among the Orthodox there was a nasty three-way schism (UOC-MP, UOC-KP and UAOC) that has now, thanks to the Phanar’s ineffectual and uncanonical intrusion in 2019, morphed into a somehow even nastier three-way schism (UOC, UOC-KP and OCU). It is also not simply repeating Russian talking points to point out that Russophone Ukrainians in the Donetsk Basin – who rebelled, it must be said, in response to Ukrainian police actions against Russophone activists in Kharkov in early April of 2014 – have been under sustained military bombardment by the Ukrainian Army for the past eight years.

As for Constantinople: it does not actually exist as any kind of independent political power anymore, and has not existed as such since 1453. As an ecclesiastical power, its control lies in the hands of a small coterie of wealthy Greek-Americans. It is an unfortunate reality of Orthodox politics that we tend to look back and wax nostalgic for past empires, whether Byzantine or Russian, when doing so is least profitable. But the fact remains: Ukrainian clerics and politicians looking for clear moral and spiritual guidance today can no more ‘look to’ Constantinople than they can ‘look to’, say, Maghas in ancient Scythia.

The problems of social dysfunction, rampant official corruption and government opacity that the Ukraine currently faces are problems that are deeply familiar to most Russians. And that was before the war that is currently hideously destroying whatever semblance of public order was left. No, the horrors of the current war are sufficient to themselves without indulging this flight of fancy that Russia somehow envies what the Ukraine had become.

... We should look to the deep history of Ukraine and Russia as a source both of explanations for the present horror, but also the great secret of history, like the last voice trapped in Pandora’s box: the hope that things were once very different, and could be again.

I wouldn’t put it in precisely these terms, but I agree with the substance of this sentiment, and that is a hope which I share. I would, however, make a needed distinction between ‘hope’ and ‘false hope’. My Russian and Ukrainian friends here (and, yes, I do have both) do not see much room for hope at the moment, and – echoing Peter Hitchens in his recent thoughts on the subject – I find my own hope in this situation to be rather tenuous.

Suppose Russia were to do away with Putin tomorrow. Suppose they were to institute a suitably democratic form of government. It might be modelled on the medieval veche of Pskov and Novgorod. It might be modelled the noble zemsky sobor which more closely resembled the ancient Scandinavian ting. It might be modelled on the obshchina, the rural commune of the free black-earth peasantry of the Russian North. Or it might be modelled on the mir (village-level cooperative society) and artel’ (artisanal guild, later a proto-labour union) of later Tsarist Russia, in which the old democratic spirit managed to cling on until Witte and Stolypin dealt them the death-blow. Suppose this new, independent and democratic body were to hold elections and deliberate on policies about how they would orient themselves geopolitically.

Bear in mind that most Russian people rightly and with fondness remember their role in ending the Nazi terror in Europe: a great struggle against a clear and inhuman evil; a struggle paid for mostly in Russian blood. Bear in mind that their immediate neighbours, the Ukraine among them, view this same struggle with what may generously be termed indifference, given the state-sponsored veneration of figures like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych and state support provided to units like the Azov Battalion. Bear in mind that many of the older generation of Russian voters today remember vividly the misery, deprivation and anarchic violence of the 1990s which Milbank rather selectively cites as a time of ‘democratic federalism and the chance for real liberty’. What on earth makes Milbank think that this body would make laws and enact policies substantially different from those which Putin did?

Whether democratic or autocratic, Russia will always be different from its neighbours, let alone from those of us living in England or America. And sadly, as the official policies of imposing blanket sanctions on life necessities, restrictions of freedom of movement and business on the Russian people themselves bear witness, when Russians fail to demonstrate that they are sufficiently like us to suit our imperial whims, we punish them collectively, as a whole people. The Western failure to understand, let alone respect, this difference is one of the deeper root causes of the current war in the Ukraine. Actually sorting out that conflict in a way that is lasting and just will be a painful process, and a Scandinavian democratic makeover for Russia will not do the trick.

Who is for peace?

‘War is a grave sin against God: pray for peace’

- Metropolitan Onufriy

‘There can be only one answer: to fight until victory’

- Sergei Dumenko

Two statements, released on the same day in response to recent events. One (which, by the way, includes a patriotic affirmation of Ukraine’s current borders) is a call for restraint and reflection from all the world powers. The other is a hatred-filled nationalist screed calling for attack upon the Muscovite enemy. It is clearer than ever before, which Church is with the Prince of Peace, and which ‘church’ is with the idol of Mars. May God protect and preserve the rightful Metropolitan of all of the Ukraine, His Holiness Vladyka Onufriy, may God grant him many years, and may God grant peace to all of the lands under his rightful jurisdiction.

In my distress I cried unto the Lord, and he heard me.
Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue.
What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue?
Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper.
Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!
My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace.
I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war.

The billionaire class and the quest for man-godhood

Evidently, we now know that Jeff Bezos consults with psychic mediums. Elon Musk has a strange fascination with the eighteenth-century occultist and alchemist Giuseppe Balsamo. Peter Thiel and Larry Page have a long-standing association with modern-day occultist and alchemist Ray Kurzweil. What does this all mean? Is it simply that GK Chesterton’s observation is true, that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing but rather believe in anything?

This may indeed be part of it, and a very significant part at that. However, I’m not fully convinced. The behaviour of the billionaire class indicates that they do indeed believe in something: the acquisition of more and more material wealth and resources at the expense of everybody else. They already own so much of it that their continuing efforts to grab as much of the capital, as much of the real estate, as much of the infrastructure as they can is not an exercise in mere greed. It is rather an exercise of power and political control. But there’s even more to it than that. The willingness with which our hypercapitalist tech elites – Bezos, Page, Thiel, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg and I’m sure quite a few others as well – have for over 20 years now been investing heavily in cryonics (Alcor), consciousness transference (Neuralink), private space travel (SpaceX, Blue Origin), virtual realities (Meta) and aging reversal through ‘biohacking’ (Altos Labs) is indicative of something else. They are using that wealth that they are sucking up in such great quantities, in an attempt to achieve the goals of mediæval and early-Renaissance alchemy: transmutation and immortality.

The West Coast has been something of a hotbed for New Age spiritualism and occult esoterica since the late 1960s, which shouldn’t be surprising given that it rose out of the counterculture that had its epicentre there. Esalen, Druid Heights, Green Gulch, the Waterkin, Soka Gakkai (at least in its US bulwark) and – yes – the Church of Satan, all have their establishment in California, with a significant portion of those being based in San Francisco. (One should also note that this spiritual and social milieu also produced Fr Seraphim Rose; take that as you will.) So it shouldn’t be too surprising that Silicon Valley as a whole has imbibed that same spiritual atmosphere. After all, it’s fairly common knowledge that the æsthetics and design philosophy of Steve Jobs were highly influenced by Zen Buddhism.

The ‘performance artist’ Marina Abramović in her collaborations with Microsoft supporting their innovations into ‘mixed reality’ is something of a case-in-point. Microsoft did pull down the ad with Abramović in it. And Abramović was evidently baited by the ‘conspiracy theorists’ into fervently denying ever being a Satanist. (Honestly, I believe her. I think she’s genuinely a performance artist, doing an act that sells. It follows that she is not likely to be a very happy or balanced person.) But that is really a distraction from the main point. The entire project of ‘mixed reality’, the blurring between what is real and what is virtual, and the idea that human beings will act as their own demiurges, crafting themselves as homunculi in this new pseudo-reality, is very much still a concern. Witness Zuck’s new project Meta, in all its insidious glory.

That’s really what this is about: it’s the choice highlighted by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The desire to transcend death is part of the human condition. But the choice before us is this: in seeking after that transcendence do we turn to the living God of the living reality, and the God-man who appears to us in the flesh, embodied within the stuff of our own everyday material lives? Or do we instead attempt, by means of power, wealth, and all the alchemy and extension of life/consciousness they can buy with it, to become as far as possible ‘little gods’ – to become man-gods? This choice is heightened, to almost apocalyptic terms, by the growing grasping control over the reality by the few, and the accessibility (and desirability) of the illusion by the many. As Berdyaev himself put it:

Today the soul of man no longer rests upon secure foundations, everything round him is unsteady and contradictory, he lives in an atmosphere of illusion and falsehood under a ceaseless threat of change. Evil comes forward under an appearance of good, and he is deceived; the faces of Christ and of Antichrist, of man become god and of God become man, are interchangeable. A large number of contemporary people have “divided minds.” They are the sort of folk whom Dostoevsky displayed to us…

If it’s an affectation, the occultism, esotericism and attraction to alchemy by our ruling class is certainly an odd one. To be absolutely clear on this, I do not think (pace QAnon) that the occultism and esotericism and alchemy-dabbling of the ruling class is wilful and orchestrated (at least on the human level). After all, Ayn Rand influenced Anton LaVey, not the other way around, and therefore logically must have preceded him. The cupidity of the elites preceded the interest any of them had in spiritualism and esoterica. When one is driven by the lust for greater and greater degrees of wealth and control over the means of production, the desire to become ‘like gods’ becomes that much more powerful.

Berdyaev—and, by extension, Dostoevsky—must be given his due on this question, though. We are faced with the choice between occult (that is to say, metaverse and mind-hack, a technological illusion of power and control, a façade of freedom from necessity); and the freedom that comes from paying respect to reality on the other. It is increasingly clear what choice many of the ruling class (Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Page et al.) will ultimately choose to make, and we should take care that they don’t make that choice for us.

A spectre is haunting Christendom…

In his article ‘Philosophical verity and intelligentsia truth’, written for Landmarks in 1905, Nikolai Berdyaev made the following observations about Marxism and its interpretation by the Russian intelligentsia.

It must be said that the objective and scientific side of Marxism contained a healthy kernel… but on the whole we misunderstood economic materialism and Marxism. We construed them ‘subjectively’ and adapted them to the intelligentsia’s traditional psychology. Economic materialism lost its objective character: production and creation were reduced to secondary importance, while the subjective, class side of Social Democracy came to the fore. The Russian Marxists were possessed by an extreme love for equality, combined with extreme faith in the nearness of the socialist consummation and in the possibility of achieving this consummation in Russia even sooner, perhaps, than in the West. The element of objective truth was completely submerged in the subjective element.

Berdyaev would maintain this line throughout his career. His book on The Russian Revolution, compiled in 1931, more fully explored this theme. Berdyaev’s understanding of Karl Marx was twofold: on the one hand, he deeply respected Marx as an objective social critic and the explicator of a particular method of analysis. On the other hand, however, he found certain of Marx’s assumptions objectionable on metaphysical grounds. What he objected to most in Marx was his lack of a qualitative dimension in the consideration of production – he could find no room in Marx for the æsthetic, the purely creative impulse. In Berdyaev’s reading of Marx, all production was quantitative, was ‘ant-hill’ production. (Personally, I find this objection a trifle unfair. Marx had a genuine and heartfelt love for the poetry and pathos of William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets that both transcended and illuminated his class analysis.) His other objection to Marx’s thought was that it carried with it a deterministic teleology grounded in an unfulfilled or frustrated messianic religious impulse: and here I tend to think Berdyaev is on firmer ground.

But note what both of these criticisms share! Berdyaev aimed his critiques of Marx at his implied metaphysics, not at his methodology! Indeed, Berdyaev’s praise above of the ‘objective and scientific side’ of Marxism refers precisely to his ‘materialist’ methods of historical analysis. What he found dangerous in Marxism was the tendency – a tendency Marx himself warned against – of imbuing the proletarian class with a kind of religious-idealist ‘mystique’. In the Russian-Soviet formulation of Marxism, this mystique became the criterion against which all cultural and ideological output was judged. And it was precisely this mystique that Berdyaev characterised as a Christian hæresy in The Russian Revolution. It was precisely this mystique that Berdyaev convincingly convicted of having its own mythology, its own sacred rites, its own priests, its own holy texts, its own apocalyptic messianism.

Berdyaev’s understanding – however amorphous and unsystematic – of a Christian socialism, attempted to merge what he considered to be the objective methodology of Karl Marx with the subjective impulse for the creative that animated a decided non-socialist like Solovyov, the relational impulse for the vertical ascent that animated a reactionary socialist like Leont’ev, and the metaphysical impulse to explore the individual in all his moral and subconscious depth that animated an ex-radical Orthodox Christian novelist like Dostoevsky. It is not altogether clear that he succeeded in doing so, and indeed by the end of his career he cast doubts on his own wisdom in that pursuit. But it was in pursuit of just such a synthesis that Saint Maria of Paris and Saint Il’ya Fondaminskii won martyrdom for the Orthodox faith at the hands of the Nazis.

This would seem to suggest that the liberation theologians in the tradition of Gutierrez and Boff were, in a certain sense, right. Inductively, the Marxist methodology appears valid, and is a valid way of representing a fuller sense of historical truth. For obvious reasons, Christians cannot accept the metaphysics that grew out of Marxism, which lend themselves to a hard determinism and to a tolerance of ‘natural’ evil and sacrifice of personhood. Berdyaev, who began his career as a dedicated Marxist, ultimately found this intolerable. But still, the spectre of Marx continues to haunt us, and with good reason, as we see a billionaire class which is hoarding ever greater shares of the world’s resources, intruding into all of our lives with greater frequency and impunity, entertaining fever dreams of hacking human beings (see also here).

As the global œconomy transitions from capitalism into something even more hideous and unrecognisable – what Yanis Varoufakis calls ‘techno-feudalism’ – the billionaire class is currently attempting to harness the world’s wealth toward cheating death with cryogenics and consciousness transference and guaranteeing their own survival (but no one else’s) in perpetuity. If humankind wants to survive on any sort of recognisable level, we must find some way to stop this ‘project’ before it strips human beings of their humanity. All theologies, insofar as they can inform anthropologies, must become theologies of liberation.

Righteous Tsar Boris Mihail, Equal-to-the-Apostles, Enlightener of the Bulgarians

Tsar Saint Boris Mihail of Bulgaria

Christ is Risen!

Today is Holy Pascha, the Feast of Feasts, the Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Today we celebrate the holy eucatastrophe, the inversion of the logic of the fallen created order – in short, we celebrate the defeat of death. Rejoicing is a difficult thing for me right now, but still I rejoice in this: that human beings and systems will not have the last word, and that human faltering and failure are not the sum total of our existence, and that even death, which seems to be all-powerful and all-consuming in this world, is broken.

It also happens to be – and he would be a shame to ignore now, given just the fact of how fascinating the guy is – the feast day of Tsar Saint Boris Mihail, one of the pivotal figures in mediæval European history. To understand why he was so important to the shape of Europe of the 800s, it’s necessary to understand his historical and political surroundings.

First of all, there was the political crisis of the east-west division of Christendom, which had been a long time in the brewing. Although Empress Eirēnē of the Eastern Roman Empire had upheld the faith that was proclaimed in both West and East and officially ended iconoclasm by convoking the Second Council of Nicæa, in 800 Pope Leo III nevertheless anointed the Frankish king Karl the Big as ‘Roman’ ‘Emperor’ on the rather misogynistic legal pretext that the Roman Empire could not be ruled by a woman. (Ulpia Severina, Augusta of Rome after the death of her husband Aurelian in 274, may well have had a few things to say about that.) This political manœuvre, as well as justly infuriating Empress Eirēnē, further alienated the Church in the West from the Church in the East, and created a long power struggle between the Frankish kingdom and Eastern Rome that would shape many of the subsequent political conflicts in Central Europe.

Second, there was the unification of the Western Slavic tribes to Bulgaria’s northwest under Mojmír, which took place amidst the power vacuum left by the defeat of the Pannonian Avars by the Franks. This confederation was Great Moravia. And although the Moravians were technically a vassal state of the Carolingian kingdom, in practice they turned out to be far more independent than the Franks liked.

And third, there was Bulgaria itself. Upon his accession to the khaganate, Boris had inherited from his prædecessors Krum the Fearsome, Omurtag the Builder and his father Presiyan a sprawling, massive territory that stretched from Ohrid to the Dneister, and from the modern-day site of Budapest to the Black Sea. This territory, as any student of Balkan history can tell you, is difficult at the best of times to keep united and well-defended, and Boris was always going to have an uphill row to hoe when it came to protecting it all from incursions by Eastern Rome, by the Serbs, by the Croats, by the Pannonian Slavs, by the Magyars and by the newly-arrived Moravians. What’s more, under Presiyan – as prophesied by Saint Boyan-Enravota – the various tribes of Slavic peasants ruled by the Turkic Bulghar lordly class had already begun converting to Christianity. The new khaghan needed, as much for political and diplomatic reasons as for spiritual ones, to unite his people around one faith.

So. Enter Boris [Bg. Борис].

Boris, the son of the aforementioned Presiyan, had no sooner come to power in 852 than his rule was tested by numerous border wars with Greeks, Serbs, Croats and Franks… wars in which he tended to come off a bit the worse for wear each time. These wars lasted almost until the end of the 860s. He was first an ally and then a rival of the saintly King Rastislav of Great Moravia. He turned his attention between the Frankish Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire as both of them kept pressuring him along his borders.

Boris, thankfully for the Bulgarians, was no fool. He understood well enough that in order to keep the Slavs he commanded from rebelling against him or being subsumed into the kingdoms around him, he would need to convert to Christianity eventually. He understood quite astutely the nature of the rivalry between the ‘Roman Emperor’ in the West and the Roman Emperor in the East, and managed with remarkable political adroitness to ‘play both sides’… even when he was on the losing end militarily. At first, the khaghan leaned pretty heavily toward Rome rather than Constantinople. Needing to counterbalance against Rastislav’s Moravians combined with Karloman in revolt, Boris asked for an alliance with Louis the German – a provision of which would have brought Frankish missionaries into Bulgaria, and Bulgaria effectively into the Western Roman political-ecclesiastical ambit. However, in 863, the Eastern Roman Emperor Michael III launched a surprise attack into Bulgarian-controlled Thrace, and forced Boris to come to a peace agreement.

Fatefully, Boris decided to adopt the Eastern Liturgical rites of Emperor Michael III as part of this peace agreement. However, there are indications that he was already preparing to set his face eastward. For one thing, Boris’s half-sister Anna had already converted to Christianity in the Constantinopolitan style, having been held hostage in the Eastern Roman court for several years. For another thing, the Christianity of the Slavic peoples he ruled – coming as it did from the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius – already followed the Constantinopolitan rubrics and used a language, Slavonic, whose status in the West was notably in dispute. Whatever his ultimate motive (or mixture of motives!), the khaghan Boris agreed to be baptised in secret along with his family at his capital at Pliska. The Byzantine Emperor himself was his sponsor, and he took the Emperor’s name in baptism as his own: Mihail.

Boris Mihail’s baptism provoked an immediate and violent response from the Turkic Bulgarian aristocracy. They saw the Christian faith as an affront to their nomadic traditions as well as their legitimacy. In 865 the pagan boyars staged an open revolt against the newly-christened khaghan. Boris managed to crush the revolt. But despite having been recently baptised, he wasn’t all in on the whole peace, love and forgiveness aspect of Christianity yet. Nope: he went full Shang Yang on the behinds of the defeated rebels. Boris ordered the executions of fifty-two boyars, their wives and their children, exterminating their entire families. To complete the turn away from paganism, Boris Mihail abdicated the Turkic title of khaghan and adopted the Slavic title of knyaz ‘prince’, and the Greek-derived title of tsar ‘emperor’.

There was also the much more delicate matter of ecclesiology, which Boris handled with a much defter and lighter hand. The missionaries which arrived from Constantinople in Bulgaria all served the Liturgy in Greek and commemorated the Patriarch of Constantinople as the head of the Church. But Boris’s ultimate aim was to establish a Slavonic-speaking church that was beholden neither to Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, nor to Rome and the Western ‘Roman’ ‘Empire’. In this aim, he was perfectly happy to keep playing both sides against each other. Despite having had a Constantinopolitan baptism, he sent a very polite envoy to Rome with a list of 115 ecclesiological and legal questions addressed to Pope Nicholas I; he received back a famous reply of 106 answers. The Pope also sent Latin and Frankish missionaries into Bulgaria, headed by Formosus, the ambitious bishop of Porto.

This action produced no small amount of consternation in New Rome, where it was regarded as an encroachment on Constantinopolitan jurisdiction. Archbishop Photios of Constantinople took several steps in answer to the Latin missions in Bulgaria. He produced his own letter to Boris in 866, ‘On the duties of princes’. At the request of Boris’s Moravian neighbours to the northwest, he also sent among them Saints Cyril and Methodius and encouraged the adoption of a Liturgical rite in the Slavonic language. And he began attacking Latin missionaries in general – but Formosus in particular – for adding the filioque clause to the Nicene Creed. Photios’s combative approach to Rome was one decisive factor leading to the ‘Photian schism’ of 867. Boris was able to take deft political strides in the middle of this schism, and by turning his face again to Constantinople in 870 he was able to secure a promise of autocephaly for the Bulgarian Church, with its primate holding the rank of Archbishop.

In Great Moravia, the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius was meeting both with success and with jealousy. The mission was baptising critical numbers of Slavs, who could now hear the Gospel of Christ spoken in their own tongue. However, this aroused the wrath of the Frankish bishops who sought Moravia as their own jurisdiction. When Rastislav was betrayed to his blinding, confinement and death at the Franks’ hands by his traitorous nephew Svätopluk, the resulting Frankish-controlled Moravian government, at the instigation of the Frankish bishop Wiching, began ruthlessly persecuting the disciples of Methodius, subjecting them to exile, torture, slavery and likely death.

Boris Mihail, never blind to a good opportunity, welcomed the survivors of the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius into Bulgaria in 886 – in particular Saints Kliment and Naum. He instructed them to build schools and encouraged them to teach native clergy as well as teach any student who wanted the Slavonic letters. They also built up the first major corpus of Liturgical works, hagiographies and other documents in the Slavonic language.

The first Tsar of Bulgaria followed the example in old age of many mediæval princes and kings who had first embraced Christianity in their prime… and here again we see these incidental linkages (as with the eremitical saints in each) between the Church in Britain and the Bulgarian Church. Like Saints Elaeth ‘Frenin’ and Custennin of Strathclyde, Judicaël of Brittany, Ceolwulf of Northumbria, Æþelræd of Mercia and Sigeberht of East Anglia, Tsar Boris Mihail abdicated his throne in favour of his son Vladimir, and entered the monastic life.

Sadly, Vladimir’s faith was not as firm as his father’s. He began destroying the Christian churches, driving out the Christian priests, and proclaiming a revival of paganism. This met with a lukewarm reaction among the boyars (most of whom by now had already converted), and with a much colder reaction from the populace which were already strongly Christian. And it also enraged Boris, who came out of his monastic seclusion in order to raise an army with which to defeat his own son. Boris had Vladimir blinded and thrown into a dungeon, and set up his second son Simeon as Tsar before retiring again to his monastery. Two years later Boris emerged again from his monastery. This time, he helped his son raise an immense army to fend off an invasion of Bulgaria by the pagan Magyars. They defeated them decisively at the Battle of Southern Bug. He then returned to his monastery again, this time permanently, and he reposed in the Lord on the second of May, 907.

As with many of the kingly saints I treat here, Tsar Boris Mihail may not, on first glance, appear very saintly. In particular, his treatment of the pagan boyars after their rebellion and defeat seems unduly harsh. However, the importance of his conversion to the Christian faith of his subjects cannot possibly be overstated. Neither can his insistence on an independent Slavonic-speaking Church, an insistence which the ecclesiology of Constantinople found it could more readily accommodate than that of Rome. And although his conversion to Christianity may have had one or more motives which reek of political advantage, the fact that he forswore all political power after 896 and spent the last decade of his life in solitary contemplative prayer speaks to the influence that the Christian doctrine eventually had upon him. Holy Tsar Boris Mihail, apostolic guide of the Bulgarian people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Boris Mihail of Bulgaria, Tone 6:

Full of the fear of God, and enlightened by holy baptism,
Thou becamest a habitation of the Holy Spirit, O right-believing King Boris;
And having established the Orthodox Faith in the land of Bulgaria,
And set aside the scepter of kingship,
Thou madest thine abode in the wilderness,
Didst flourish in ascetic struggles,
And found grace before the Lord.
And now, standing before the throne of the Most High,
Pray thou, that He grant unto us who entreat thee salvation for our souls.

Trying to process the Atlanta shootings

It’s been my experience that Clean Week always seems to hit hard with bad news, at least in recent years. Tuesday’s news of the shootings of eight workers in massage parlours in Atlanta kind of struck home hard for me and my family. We haven’t discussed it that much, but it’s been on my mind a lot. Firstly, there is much here to grieve over, much here to pray over. In particular I pray for the affected communities in Atlanta, for the victims and their families, and for the Asian American and Pacific Islander folks in the United States who feel the grief and insecurity of this massacre most keenly.

But it is only natural, as part of that grieving process, to ask ‘why’ and to seek to understand how this could have happened. This case should raise for us Americans several troubling questions surrounding the modern relationship between the sexes. We should be intensely scrutinising how particularly American Protestantism has attempted to address that relationship, and how fraught it has become in recent years. We should be looking closely at the historical ways in which white American (and British and French too, to be fair) men have ideologically colonised the (female, or feminine) Asian body, and how the association of Asian-ness with a certain kind of femininity has fed into sexist myths. And following from this we should be carefully examining the current-day power struggles and ideological struggles between Western and East Asian countries that continue to prop up both the related ‘yellow fever’ construct and the ‘yellow peril’ construct. I’ve already encountered people commenting on this story, already trying to dismiss the killer as ‘mentally ill’ and pointing out his sexual hang-ups to preclude any discussion on how race relations, œconomic exploitation or foreign policy might have had some bearing on his motives or on the vulnerability of the victims. This is remarkably depressing, because there is much that needs to be said along each and every one of these dimensions.

To the first, the fact that there was a self-acknowledged motive of sexual entitlement and ‘sex addiction’ on the part of the killer, and the fact that the killer was a fundamentalist Baptist, are both worth commenting on. To a certain extent, the same commentary that I made in the blog post ‘Misogyny and the flight from feeling’ also applies here. Our culture places a ridiculously unhealthy emphasis on sex. American culture having abandoned healthy traditional rites-of-passage, fraternal and communal forms of male bonding, and ideals of physical fitness and activity in their own right as expressions of masculinity, American manhood is now primarily expressed in the unhealthy terms of capitalist wealth acquisition, risk-seeking behaviours and sexual conquest. Although women have not been desocialised to the same degree by the culture, there is also an unhealthy burden placed on women to make themselves sexually-appealing and -available; contradictorily to remain chaste and ‘pure’; but at the same time also responsible in toto for the consequences of frustrated male libido, including any violence perpetrated against them. The killer in this case seems to have been motivated by the same frustrations, and foisted the responsibility for his own sexual hang-ups onto the women who ‘tempted’ him.

It’s also worth exploring the relationship of how these ‘temptations’ are configured, to the expressions of chiliastic American fundamentalism and the incredible, intolerable psychic burdens that it places on its members as individuals as a result of its apocalypse-oriented legalistic and Calvinistic theology. The Southern Baptist Church of which the killer was a member has, of course, repudiated all of his actions and made a public statement renouncing all forms of misogyny and racism. We may take that statement, for what it’s worth, as sincere and well-meaning. But we also need to be examining the content of the misguided and hæretical theology that this church and its pastor have preached, which absolutely had an effect on the actions the killer chose to take. It is worth asking what sorts of beliefs made him think that murdering masseuses would ‘help’ and ‘protect’ other men, and preserve them from ‘temptation’; and if a belief that the end of time and the threat of hell was imminent might not have accentuated and lent an urgency to these beliefs.

Likewise with the idea that Asian women’s bodies are in some way ‘fair game’ for white Western men – a power dynamic that undergirds an entire marketing and business model of Asian-themed American erotica. That goes all the way back to the days of British and French colonialism in Asia. Among George Orwell’s œuvre (knowledge of which among Americans seems to stop with his anti-Soviet screeds Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm), his book Burmese Days actually manages to be an insightful view into the way that even well-meaning British colonisers used their military power and carefully stage-managed social prestige to sexually dominate and use local women (and then toss them aside). This pattern also held true with the French in colonised Southeast Asia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the American military in the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea (still ongoing), Guam (still ongoing) and Okinawa (still ongoing). The entire stereotype of Asian women as ‘exotic’, hyper-feminine, submissive sex dolls, which figures into the marketing of pornography and prostitution involving Asian women, stems from this long legacy of colonial violence and rape by Britain, France, the Netherlands and America.

The ‘yellow fever’ problem and its associated stereotypes among Western men, are thus inextricable from even the present-day configurations (and associated myths) of military power and capitalist exploitation in the Pacific. The mirror image of this, of course, is the demonisation of Asian masculinity in the ‘yellow peril’ stereotype. It’s an old story, but the ‘yellow peril’ mythology has extended in the modern time into the international scene, where it has metastasised into a shadowplay of anti-Russia and anti-China narratives, meant specifically to distract the American people from the gross political mismanagement and œconomic rapine happening at home. But to begin with, the stereotype of the fecund, inscrutable, untrustworthy and ultimately disloyal and seditious Asian man has its roots in the deliberate capitalist exploitation of Chinese wage slavery on the railroad construction projects in America in the latter 1800s. To prevent Chinese workers and ‘native’ white American workers from banding together or unionising, California railroad bosses actively promoted anti-Chinese racism as a way to divide the workers and depress wages. Which leads us full circle back to the beginning consideration: the deconstruction and hyper-individualisation of masculinity in America by capitalist modernity, and the sole remaining outlets for masculine self-expression being wealth acquisition, consumerist excess, violence and sexual domination.

What is clear to me is that in the murders of these eight Atlantans – six of whom were AAPI women – the entire American culture needs to grapple with itself. Standing in the dock are the emptying of American masculinity of all values except violence and material gain and sexual domination; the pervasiveness of evil doctrines of penal substitutionary atonement and chiliastic proclamations of a divine judgement in wrath and wilful damnation; and the ongoing American imperialist warmongering in East Asia and the Pacific that initially led to, and reinforces, these racial stereotypes of Asian women. Not just one man, and not just one confession, but America as a nation must repent of its sins before God and humankind.

Holy Greatmartyr Georgi the Younger of Sofia

Saint Georgi the Younger of Sofia

The eleventh of February is, in the Orthodox Church, the commemoration of the great Bulgarian martyr Saint Georgi of Kratovo, who is also known as Saint Georgi the Younger of Sofia. He died as a martyr for the Orthodox faith under the Ottoman Turks, and his death heralded a series of struggles within Bulgaria for national liberation from the Turks throughout the following two centuries. Saint Georgi the Younger was commemorated with particular attention by Bulgaria’s historian-saint and hagiographer Saint Paisii Hilendarski. His cultus became particularly important in the 1700s and 1800s as a result of Saint Paisii’s efforts, and also as a mark of Bulgaria’s growing popular awareness of a national identity.

Saint Georgi [Bg. Георги, Srb. Ђорђе, Mk. Ѓорѓи] was born near the end of the 1400s in the town of Kratovo, which now lies in North Macedonia; however it seems he lived much of his early life in the Bulgarian town of Sredets, which is now a neighbourhood in the capital of Sofia. This may have been on account of a desire on the part of Georgi’s father Ivan, to avoid the young Georgi from being enslaved to the Ottoman state, conscripted into the Janissary corps and converted to Islâm. His hagiography suggests that he may have been an only child, born to his parents Ivan and Mariya in their old age after much prayer. He was named after the Greatmartyr George of Lydda, indicating that he may have been born in April. His father and mother were of the stock of skilled urban craftsmen, and Georgi too took up a trade, and became a deft silversmith. He received a good education and was literate, reading with keen attention the Holy Scriptures. He lived a blameless life in Sredets and was respected and honoured by many.

So much so, in fact, that the Turkish authorities took it upon themselves to recruit the young smith – perhaps thinking that if they could make him convert to Islâm that many other townsmen would follow. They tried to put a fez on his head and make him pray in the Muslim way, but he refused to do this and threw the hat upon the ground. The Turks then beat him mercilessly and dragged him before the vali, who was charmed by young Georgi’s upright, prepossessing manner. Taking a gentler tack, the vali promised Georgi great honours and wealth from the hand of Sultân Selim I himself, if he should convert to Islâm. But Georgi refused all of these promises and boldly proclaimed his belief in Jesus Christ. The vali ordered Georgi to be punished by falaka, and the soles of his feet beaten painfully with rods. This is a cruel form of torture that is still used in modern-day Turkey.

Georgi refused to give in, however, and continued to confess Christ although the tortures increased in severity and in cruelty. The Turkish authorities had him paraded through the streets to ritually humiliate him, but Georgi called upon the name of the Lord to help him. At last, the vali ordered that he be publicly executed by burning at the stake, and the authorities prepared a stake and pyre in the middle of Sredets, onto which they threw the greatmartyr still living, on the eleventh of February, 1515. In this way he attained the victory and entered the company of saints. The Turks burned his body, and as he was burning the Turks threw dogs onto the fire to prevent the Christians from finding and venerating his remains. Yet by a strange wonder, the body of the greatmartyr Georgi was not consumed by the flames, and the Christians of Sredets were able to find his body on the pyre unscathed. They brought it into the Church of St Marina secretly by night, and buried it with great respect and reverence.

On the twenty-sixth of May that same year, the relics of Saint Georgi were uncovered and translated into a fine reliquary wrought for the purpose by Georgi’s fellow smiths in fine metal, who now had particular cause to honour one of their own. This reliquary was brought into the nearby Dragalevski Monastery of the Mother of God of Vitosha, where it is still venerated every year, both on the day of his martyrdom and on the day of his translation. As mentioned before, Georgi’s cultus became important after his hagiography was committed to writing by Saint Paisii of Hilendar. He also became a focus for the Bulgarian movement for liberation and a model of bravery and insistence upon the truth for the Bulgarian freedom fighters. Holy greatmartyr Georgi, bold athlete for Christ and witness to the Truth of the Incarnation, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Georgi the Younger of Sofia, Tone 3:

Your holy martyr Georgi, O Lord,
Through his sufferings has received an incorruptible crown from You, our God.
For having Your strength, he laid low his adversaries,
And shattered the powerless boldness of demons.
Through his intercessions, save our souls!

Dragalevski Monastery of the Mother of God of Vitosha, Bulgaria

Holy Hierarch Evtimii, Patriarch of Tărnovo and All Bulgaria

Saint Evtimii of Tărnovo

Today in the Orthodox Church is the feast-day of Saint Evtimii of Tărnovo, another of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church’s great mediæval luminaries. Saint Evtimii is perhaps the greatest of the Bulgarian saintly patriarchs of his time; like Saints Teodosii (his teacher) and Romil, he was also a firm and vocal (er, so to speak) supporter of the Hesychast movement in the Orthodox Church spearheaded by the great Saint Grēgorios of Sinai, who had settled and reposed in Bulgaria. Saint Evtimii was also an accomplished linguist and a formidable scholarly mind, and he did much to uplift the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in his time as Patriarch.

Saint Evtimii [Bg. Евтимий] was born around the year 1317 in Tărnovo. He was Bulgarian, and his parents likely belonged to the eminent Tsamblak family of that city. He received a fine education from the monastic schools in Tărnovo, and around the age of thirty he chose to become a monk himself. He was tonsured and accepted into the monastery at Kilifarevo, which had been founded by Saint Teodosii. By dint of his humble attitude and his steadfast obedience he earned the trust of Saint Teodosii, who appointed him his assistant in 1363. Together they travelled to Constantinople and stayed at the Studion Monastery which had been founded under the rule of Patriarch Saint Gennadios, which was renowned for its library. It was here, shortly afterward, that Saint Teodosii reposed in the Lord.

Saint Evtimii distinguished himself among the monks at Studion for his obedience, for his willingness to learn, and the rapidity with which he soaked up the wisdom of the holy place. At some point he moved from Studion to Athos, where he established himself at the Monastery of Saint Athanasios the Athonite. Here he was influenced by Saints Grēgorios of Sinai and Iōannēs Koukouzelēs. He was punished with exile by the Emperor Iōannēs V Palaiologos and sent to the isle of Lemnos, possibly for speaking out against the emperor’s submission to the Pope of Rome. At length he was permitted to return to Athos. When he did he entered the Bulgarian Monastery of Zographou and stayed there for a brief time.

He returned to his native Bulgaria in 1371. Here he founded a monastery with attached school dedicated to the Holy Trinity in Tărnovo, and applied himself to a great linguistic task of educating the people… continuing and deepening the work that had been begun by the Seven Holy Saints of the South Slavs. On Athos, he had been exposed to, and discussed, a number of sacred texts in the original Greek, and had found that the Bulgarian equivalents he had grown up with had been poorly transcribed in an irregular manner, such that they gave cause to confusion and rise to disputes. Saint Evtimii set to work reforming Church Slavonic orthography to render it more intelligible to ordinary people. He also committed himself to a massive amount of work in translating and redacting works into Church Slavonic from Greek. The texts transcribed and redacted by Saint Evtimii still serve as the basis of the great bulk of the Liturgical texts still in use in the Slavonic setting, in Russia and the South Slavic nations. For this reason, Gregory Tsamblak, his biographer, compared his work to that of Holy Prophet Moses and of the Ægyptian Pharaoh Ptolemy I.

Saint Evtimii succeeded Patriarch Ioanikii as the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church upon the latter’s repose in 1375. Keeping true to his teacher Saint Teodosii and to the præcepts of the Orthodox Church even in a time of widespread hæresy and disputes, Saint Evtimii became the foremost supporter of the Hesychast movement in Bulgaria. He applied his wisdom and his skill as Patriarch to the rectification of moral order in the Orthodox Church and to the proper division of the word of Truth.

Saint Evtimii was in charge of commanding the Bulgarian forces at the disastrous Siege of Tărnovo in 1393, when the city was overthrown and razed by the rapacious Turks under the command of Süleyman Çelebi. Saint Evtimii had been left in command by Tsar Ivan Shishman, who was off with the main army defending Nikopol. For three months Saint Evtimii encouraged the Bulgarian forces to hold out against the Turkish foe, however – as Gregory Tsamblak suggests – Tărnovo may have been betrayed from the inside by members of one of the non-Christian neighbourhoods inside the city. The Turks entered and engaged in wholesale slaughter of the inhabitants, including 110 of the boyars and prominent citizens of the city, and desecration of the churches. Saint Evtimii was spared from this holocaust and sent into exile in Bachkovo Monastery in Thrace. Saint Evtimii reposed perhaps around the year 1402. Unfortunately, we do not know where he is buried. The death of Saint Evtimii and the destruction of Bulgaria by the Turks tragically spelled the end of the Tărnovo Patriarchate, which was subsequently subjugated to Constantinople. Only in 1870 were the historical rights of the Bulgarian Patriarchate restored. Holy hierarch Evtimii, holy hesychast and great teacher of piety to the Bulgarian people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Evtimii of Tărnovo, Tone 4:

In truth you were revealed to your flock as a rule of faith,
An image of humility and a teacher of abstinence;
Your humility exalted you;
Your poverty enriched you.
Hierarch Father Evtimii,
Entreat Christ our God
That our souls may be saved.

Patriarchal Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Tărnovo, Bulgaria

Congress as ‘sacred ground’?

Cross-posted from Every Thought Captive at Ancient Faith Radio:

To listen to the New York Times and the Washington Post tell it, the events of 6 January were nothing less than an unforgivable act of sacrilege and blasphemy. ‘Inside the most sacred spaces of American democracy,’ went the New York Times report by Grynbaum, Koblin and Hsu, unfolded an abomination of desolation worthy of the breaking news format ‘reserved for foreign wars, natural disasters or terrorist attacks’.

Now, I am someone who likes public order and stability as public goods. Order and stability are valuable no matter where they happen to be. So yes, I was naturally upset by what was essentially a riot aimed at overturning an election result in contravention of the established law of the land. I firmly believe that the rioters in DC were in the wrong, for the same reasons I believe that the looters and shooters here in Minneapolis over the summer were in the wrong. I also believe it is a very bleak indicator of the direction that our country is, in general, headed. But is it not intriguing that these established organs of the national news media would be so insistent on the sacrality of the buildings of the national government, when they have shown so little respect to public monuments elsewhere in the country? Is not the New York Times in its insistence on this public sacrality not being monumentally hypocritical, after having given space to a project – to wit, the 1619 Project – that was meant specifically to axe the root of American civil religion in the first place?

Of course, one can look at this in a cynical way. The New York Times arrogates to itself the right to attack national institutions, national statuary and national history, which it then denies to those who are not in the clique. We can look at this as a simple demarcation on the New York Times’s part between ‘friends’ (woke liberals, whose attacks on American civil religion are humane and righteous) and ‘enemies’ (conservative deplorables, whose attacks on the same are treasonous and wicked). But I think the actual stakes run quite a bit deeper than that. The riots that happened last week in DC, and the heated language around them in the press, are indicative of what is essentially a religious conflict, a contest of political myths, that attempt to orient the body politic toward very different objects of public veneration.

The 1619 Project’s actual aim from the beginning was to ‘reframe’ American history to centre the narrative around the oppressed. Unfortunately Nikole Hannah-Jones has been remarkably coy about her overall purpose (not to mention her corporate sponsors). However, I think it is reasonable to say that it attempts to create and promote an alternative revisionist history of the United States from its roots in British colonialism. The objects of veneration that can be seen most clearly in the 1619 Project are the individuals in American history, who: (a) belonged to groups seen to be historically oppressed, and (b) are seen to have worked toward ends of political or sexual liberation for their oppressed group.

On the other hand, we now also have a 1776 Project, supported by – for example – The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, as well as a broad array of historical scholars from the (Trotskyist) left, the liberal centre and the conservative right. These scholars rightly point out that the 1619 Project is ideologically motivated. However, the aim of the 1776 Project goes further than simply debunking the factual or interpretive missteps of Hannah-Jones and her fellow contributors to the New York Times. Their aim is instead to preserve and expand an ideological reading of history that places the fundamentally deistic and nominalist ideas of the American experiment at the centre of the same world-historical struggle for liberation. The aim is to preserve the Founding Fathers, the ideological principles of the founding documents, and an abstract concept of liberty as the objects of public veneration.

As Orthodox Christians, the first thing we need to understand is that these duelling myths are not our myths. Both myths are grounded in a historical naïveté about human nature and the potential for human perfection apart from God’s grace. We do not and cannot recognise a salvation of the world through abstract ideas like representative government, or through pieces of paper like the Constitution of the United States. We do not hold any truth to be ‘self-evident’ other than the Living Truth, which is the truth of one Essence in three Persons that is rendered visible and intelligible to us in the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth. I stand in full agreement with Orthodox theologians like Christos Yannaras and Vigen Guroian – and, for that matter, non-Orthodox theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank – when they voice their doubts about the fundamental soundness of America’s founding ideology and its commensurability with the revealed truth of Christ’s Person.

However, we can and should recognise that governments – even governments that are held captive to wicked men or to erroneous ideas – are nevertheless given their authority and legitimacy by God. Christians in America should still give due gratitude and respect to the establishment of justice and the insurance of domestic tranquillity – to borrow the language of the Constitutional Preamble – that the American state has (at its best) been able to provide to most of its citizens, including us. These public goods are precious and desirable, and we recognise them in every Divine Liturgy – when we pray to the Lord ‘for our country, for the president, and for all in public service… For this city, and for every city and land, and for the faithful who live in them… For favorable weather, for an abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times’.

We are compelled to pray for the country, for our cities, and for those in public service. This means that we are also compelled to seek their good. It is therefore wrong to support an unlawful riot in our nation’s capital, which seeks to maintain the President in contravention of our established Constitutional order. On the other hand, however, we must be careful not to indulge in the sorts of sentimentality that the President’s most vocal critics indulge in, when they describe the halls of our government as ‘sacred’. This is a form of idolatry, and we must oppose this as well.

Holy Hierarch Ilarion of Măglen

Saint Ilarion of Măglen

The fourteenth of January is the feast-day of one of mediæval Bulgaria’s great episcopal patrons and defenders of Orthodox doctrine, Saint Ilarion of Măglen. The small village of Măglen seems to be distinguished by holiness, both on account of this bishop and on account of the God-fearing virgin-martyr Saint Zlata; however the bishop predates the girl by over six hundred years. Saint Ilarion is venerated both on the fourteenth of January and on the twenty-first of September.

Much of what we know about Saint Ilarion [Bg. Иларион] comes from the Prologue as well as from mediæval Bulgarian sources. He was of Greek origin, and was born at some point in the 1080s in the mountain village of Promachoi, which is in the remote northern Pellas region in Greece very close to the border with North Macedonia. His parents – who were of the peasant class – were said to have been particularly observant. Ilarion followed closely in their footsteps: by the age of three he was said to have been chanting ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Sabbaoth!’ in great reverence. At the age of eighteen he left home to become a monk.

His monastic career was notable for his crystal-clear honesty and his sterling devotion, and it was not long before he was selected by the brethren to become the igumen, or abbot, of his monastery. He loved his fellow-monks and looked after them like a mother hen looks after her chicks. In particular he sought to bring his monastic brothers toward a sober way of life, and strictly limited the amount of wine they were allowed to drink. Later he founded his own monastery, dedicated to the Apostles, which followed the cœnobitic Rule of Saint Pachomios of the Ægyptian Thebaïd.

The holy abbot came to the notice of the Archbishop of Ohrid, Eustathios, when Eustathios was granted a vision of the Most Holy Theotokos, directing him to appoint the abbot in the Pellas Mountains as overseer of the flock in Măglen. Archbishop Eustathios heeded the voice of the Queen of Heaven, and lay his hands upon the abbot. This was indeed to the great benefit of the Bulgarian Church.

At this time, the hæresy of Bogomil was widespread and gaining strength among the Bulgarian people. Bogomil had preached among his followers a Gnostic and dualistic belief, possibly imported from the Paulicians of Armenia, that matter is inherently evil and that the servants of light must live as though they are divorced from all material concerns. The Bogomils scoffed at honourable marriage, at the eating of meat and the drinking of wine. And they also rejected the Incarnation of Christ, and with the Incarnation also the Sacraments of the Orthodox Church. No sooner was the holy abbot elected to his position than he found himself embattled against this militant hæretical sect. Saint Ilarion preached, in particular, one fiery homily against them, which went thus:

You are not Christians at all, since you are hostile to the Cross of Christ the Savior. You do not acknowledge the One God, you slander the teachings of the Old Testament venerated by Christians. You deceive people by hypocritical meekness while full of pride. True piety is not possible in those who do not see their own heart's corruption, but by those who ask God’s grace with prayer and humility. Evil thoughts, envy, vanity, greed, lies are not the deed of some evil thing within man to be conquered by mere fasting. These vices are the fruit of self-love which demands rooting out by spiritual efforts.

But he did not preach against Bogomilism merely in words. By his meek and ascetic example he also bore witness to the Truth of Christ. Saint Ilarion matched the fastidiousness of the Bogomils in his personal diet and in his abstentious way of living. But: he also honoured the Cross, he taught the veneration of icons, he gave great glory to the Mother of God who had called him out from his abbey. He taught the value of every one of the Sacraments by administering them with great love to the faithful, and by living an example of love and virtue in his dealing with all who met him. By Saint Ilarion’s personal example, many of Bogomil’s followers left him and again embraced the true Orthodox faith. For thirty years, from 1134 to 1164, he exhorted the faithful in the South Slavic lands, and toiled in the vineyard without rest. And on the twenty-first of October in the year 1164, Saint Ilarion reposed in the Lord, at peace with all of his monastic brethren and with his parishioners. He passed on the abbacy of his monastery to his trusted prior, Peter, before his passing. During his funeral procession, it was said that his eyes streamed tears of myrrh, and that he appeared in visions to his monks to strengthen them in their ascetic labours.

He was venerated as a saint very quickly upon his repose, and a careful investigation was made as to the genuine nature of the wonders of healing, visions and prodigies that occurred around his monastery when his name was invoked. Indeed, his relics were also uncovered sometime during the early thirteenth century (before 1207), and found to be incorrupt. This was when his remains were transferred from Măglen to Veliko Tărnovo by the great Bulgarian Tsar Kaloyan, to brighten the glory of the Bulgarian capital. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church promptly glorified him and asked his intercessions in the diptychs ever since that time. His relics were again moved in 1393 when they were taken by the Sultân Bayezid I of the Turks and entrusted to one of his vassals, who moved them to the Church of Saint Michael in Sarandopor – now in North Macedonia. Holy hierarch Ilarion, meek monastic and fierce champion of the Orthodox belief, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion for Saint Ilarion of Măglen, Tone 4:

In truth you were revealed to your flock as a rule of faith,
An image of humility and a teacher of abstinence;
Your humility exalted you;
Your poverty enriched you.
Hierarch Father Ilarion,
Entreat Christ our God
That our souls may be saved.