Alt-erior motives

In recent weeks, particularly due to the election season, we’ve seen a growing attention to a certain, primarily online political presence, called the ‘alt-right’. These netizens have been gaining influence for quite some time, and not least because of the attention being paid to them now by the political candidates running for president. It seems somewhat relevant now to pay them a bit of heed, given their growing prominence.

Here’s the thing: I follow a handful of the ‘alt-right’ websites with some significant interest: in particular, The Unz Review (I was personally acquainted with one of the contributors when I worked as an English teacher in Luoyang) and Social Matter. Generally these sites are thoughtful, interesting and entertaining, even when they happen to be wrong – even spectacularly wrong. And there are certain things on which the alt-right and I find fairly significant agreement, at least in negative terms. I share with the alt-right a deep hostility to imperialism and wars waged in the far abroad for idealistic and ‘democratic’ reasons. In fact, I share with the alt-right a profound distrust of parliamentarian proceduralism itself (or at least, the ideological faith so many mainstream liberals put in it). Like the alt-rightists, I view globalism as doing as much harm as good to genuine human communities based on geography and tradition. Also like the alt-rightists, I don’t view immigration and ‘free trade’ as necessary, positive goods. And finally, the alt-rightists and I agree that culture, broadly stated, is ultimately more important than economics.

But, high among my political commitments, I am a realist. Realists recognise core interests as needful in any alliance. If there’s anything I’ve learnt from the past decade-and-a-half of political engagement, it’s that core interests need to be determined before committing to any kind of shared action. Otherwise, as our government has ably shown, in our pursuit of projecting our model of governance abroad and remaking the world in our image, we will ally ourselves with Islamic jihadists in Syria one day, and FEMEN in Poland the next; or we will ally ourselves with out-and-out fascists in the Ukraine and simultaneously with sycophantic native-informant neocon ‘activists’ like China’s Liu Xiaobo or Russia’s Garry Kasparov. Core interests presume at least a partial positive shared understanding of the common good; and if that shared understanding doesn’t exist, ultimately an alliance will lead to strategic errors and conflicts of interest, ultimately bringing more harm than good. So the question with regard to the alt-rightists is: what the hell are you for?

That question, it turns out, is somewhat difficult to answer. The online alt-right presence is expressed largely through memes and macros, and their expression is usually aimed not at anything substantive, but with an eye specifically to offending those they imagine are easily-offended. They are the equivalents of Marilyn Manson, Tucker Max and Howard Stern – which should give you some idea that they are ‘pop-cultural’ in orientation rather than either ‘high-cultural’ or ‘folk-cultural’. It becomes necessary, then, to look at the lacunae they leave; the residue of intellectual assumptions behind the memes. What is left on the alt-right at the end of the day, is a rancid mixture of free-speech absolutism, postmodernism and white identity politics – none of which I find particularly appealing on their own merits.

The free-speech absolutism of the alt-right, in fact, is one of the reasons I’ve taken to looking at tribal values on their own merits. The Teutonic tribes of yore, even as they were not yet fully Christianised, understood that speech had power, and as such they had the good sense to regulate it, albeit informally. It is no accident, and should come as no surprise to the students of ‘human biodiversity’, that the American cultures and subcultures which descend directly from northern European immigrants (Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish settlers who came to the Upper Midwest and Plains states, for example; or the northern English colonial, and later Russian and Polish, settlement in Pennsylvania) tend to be so ‘nice’ – and it has nothing at all to do with any ideological commitment to ‘political correctness’. It has much more to do with the fact that, historically, armed societies have been polite societies, and if you said something un-‘nice’ to another warrior or his kin in a tribal society, you ran the risk of sparking off a deadly blood-feud. It is actually only in the context of an overly-feminised, atomised, homogenised and deracinated culture that the sort of Internet-based incivility and free-speech absolutism which the alt-right represent stand a chance of becoming socially-acceptable.

The postmodernism and the identity politics on the alt-right, on the other hand, are all too common, and as clear as day to those with the wit to see them. When reading alt-right screeds on Breitbart or on Taki, it is fairly obvious that they have studied long and hard at the feet of the Frankfurters and the Poststructuralists, and are eager to join battle with their teachers using the selfsame weapons. They lament their victim status with all the eagerness and crocodile tears of a teenage Tumblrista; the only difference is that they take offence on behalf of a slighted white identity. As Tom Slater puts it, ‘they may take up arms against weepy identitarians, but they share the same, deadening sense of victimhood – just with another set of dreamt-up grievances attached’.

The postmodernism doesn’t stop there, though. Still creepier to my mind, drawn as I am to certain traditional values, is this interest I see on the alt-right for transhumanist fantasies and schemes to break and remake both human society and the human subject, in ways which would have utterly appalled the Old Right (who in general had a meet and proper appreciation for the small vices, the hypocrisies and especially the habitual inertia of the everyday, common man). Read that passage in Yiannopoulos’s piece linked in my first paragraph describing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s scheme for stripping away social inhibitions for the purpose of getting human beings to think like machines, and see if that doesn’t chill the blood. It’s the stuff of Dickian and Gibsonian nightmares, CS Lewis’s NICE writ large. It is, in point of fact, the one aspect of the alt-right which is with true justification linked to fascism. I can, of course, understand why such schemes have an appeal to certain classes and subcultures, primarily haute-bourgeois Silicon Valley desk jockeys and start-up investors. It is a truism that a class which has managed to convince itself of its own superior intellect will come to see itself as the rightful ruling class. But God save us all from any government run by such ‘experts’.

On the other hand, there are two versions of the alt-left that I have seen forming. One of them, sadly, joins the alt-right’s pathetic postmodernism and white identity politics to sexual hedonism and transhumanism. The result bears an uncanny resemblance to Eduard Limonov’s National-Bolshevik street theatrics: the worst attributes of the lifestyle-left combined with the worst of the alt right; a poseur’s version of being rebellious and ‘transgressive’ through breaking race and sex taboos alike, and offering the very worst dregs of 19^th-century futurist thought in their place. The other version, though, the banner of which has been taken up by the blog of ‘Lord Keynes’, is far more sensible, to say the least! It explicitly rejects the postmodernist and identitarian direction of the alt-right as well as the ‘regressive [SJW] left’, but it retains the realist, anti-imperialist, anti-globalist, post-liberal and modernity-sceptical (that is to say, High Tory-derived) aspects of alt-rightdom that I’m inclined to respect in the first place. I’d very much like to see more of the ‘alts’ drawn into this ambit.

At the end of the day, what we need is not an ‘alt-right’ given to the weaknesses of late-19^th and early-20^th-century radicals, and guided by postmodernist and transhumanist delusions. What we need instead, if you will forgive me the anachronistic English wordplay, is an ‘eld-right’ driven by the modestly-cosmopolitan, virtue-ethical and realist suppositions posited by the High Tories and those who followed in their footsteps.

Just society and smallholder competencies

I recently read, on the recommendation of my Solidarity Hall colleague Grace Potts, a Washington Post op-ed which piqued my interest somewhat. It is written by a Latin Christian woman of thirty-two years, on the subject of chastity – and she approaches the topic in a way which celebrates the liberating potential of personal virtue, in a serious and honest way (that is to say, without being sentimental or sanctimonious). In several ways, I very much appreciate this. It’s a relief from both extremes of the sort of egocentric hedonist ‘radicalism’ which treats sexual pleasure and its pursuit as the sine qua non of liberation, and also from the stultifying, creepy Puritan sublimation and inversion of sexual desire into its rigid control and regimentation (of the sort which finds its expression in chastity rings and father-daughter balls).

And yet there’s something more than a bit uncomfortable about this piece. In the interests of full disclosure, I’m coming from the other side of the spectrum: a young father who had two kids by the age of 28, and whose collegiate life was (to my regret) not particularly chaste. My girlfriend (now wife) and I had a child before most of my extended family considered it wise or prudent, from an economic point of view – and I most certainly do not regret that decision, even though it came at a certain cost to me. So it’s slightly strange to see chastity being justified on the basis that it can fulfil a ‘feminist dream’, which in the author’s view is apparently synonymous with the lifestyle options of the urban haute-bourgeois: ‘good friends, a great family, hobbies… one of the best jobs I’ve ever had… learning how to scull on the Potomac River’. Is that really how we want to craft the case for chastity – or, for that matter, for any of the other smallholder competencies (patience, thrift, modesty, industry…)?

The smallholder competencies rely on certain smallholder assumptions about the way life works. The smallholder virtues are to a very significant extent based on the acknowledgement that we have control only over our own behaviour and its consequences within a limited social and environmental range. Chastity is valuable – and here Miss Bryan has it right – because pregnancies happen, because sexually-transmitted diseases are a real danger, and because sex is associated with emotional bonds that are not to be taken lightly. Chastity is valuable because sex is a good which is fully realised only in connexion with child-bearing, child-rearing, and the mutual, sobornyi work of keeping a household. Aristotle is the best for this realisation: virtue of all sorts is needful because we human beings are not self-sufficient, we are not powerful, we are neither gods nor beasts, and we must rely on each other when times inevitably get tough. It’s a demand of social justice in such a world, in other words, that we comport ourselves virtuously, so that we are able to look after each other when an unforetold disaster strikes.

But once we enter onto the grand arena where mastery of man and nature becomes the goal, the need for the smallholder competencies vanishes from the horizon. Hence, the existence and predominance of the very egocentric hedonist ‘radicalism’ Miss Bryan is critiquing here. Why bother striving to be virtuous when we have pills and ‘medical procedures’ for that? Also, when disaster strikes a prole who doesn’t have the means and expertise to overcome it herself, she should expect only the ‘help’ her enlightened technological masters will offer – which will, of course, be in the forms of pills and ‘medical procedures’. Whereas the smallholder competencies have a virtuous (pun intended) levelling effect, placing them at the service of consequentialist, haute-bourgeois expectations corrodes the basis for the virtues themselves, and sorts society into ‘experts’ and proletarians – masters and slaves. We run the risk not only of cheapening, but actually destroying, the real case for the smallholder competencies when we make them a mere means, a method of striving, for the end of ‘making it’ into the world of the mastery-driven and success-justified world of the haute-bourgeois. In fact, this is one of the major points Christopher Lasch, informed by a radical reading of Aristotle (along with Marx and Freud), drives home time after time after time.

It’s also somewhat telling that the author herself equates ‘virtue’ with ‘lifestyle’ at certain points. That’s not wrong, of course – the way in which you live and the habits which you build are the basis for virtue. And she redeems herself immensely by her comparison of building virtue with taking up a sport and practising it. But by this point in history, ‘lifestyle’ connotes something akin to consumer choice, and has almost more to do with self-presentation as self-edification. I think Miss Bryan recognises this, because she seeks to address it with Pope John Paul II’s exhortation to love others perfectly. Still, absent that reflection, it’s all too easy for self-development to turn into a kind of narcissism, a spiritual dead-end – the equivalent of taking the talent and burying it in the ground.

Clearly Miss Bryan cares about chastity for its own sake, as a good Catholic and follower of Pope John Paul II, and not only because it allows her to go sculling, make friends, make a lot of money and so on. For that reason, I kind of wish she would go further with this op-ed. I rather wish she would question the need for the sort of ‘liberation’ which takes the form of striving for individualistic self-fulfilment, and instead place the smallholder competencies within the framework of, say, the Catholic social doctrines.

Red Henan: ironies of latter-day Maoism

In the wake of the 40^th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s death, I find myself increasingly intrigued by the kinds of left-wing sentiment that seem to be growing in China, and in particular in my adoptive home-province of Henan. (Full disclosure: I’m very much a Henan nüxu 河南女婿, with everything that that entails.) But this is something that has long held my attention: from the street protests backing OWS in Luoyang and Zhengzhou to the torn-down towering totem in Tongxu, Henan seems long to have been a hotbed of popular support for the Chinese Left, particularly in the wake of ‘reform and opening up’. This is not, or should not be, hard to understand. Henan, along with other rural provinces like Anhui and Guizhou, was overlooked for the new commercial developments that brought astounding new wealth to the coastal cities, even as newly semi-privatised farmland was being expropriated at staggering rates, sending a deluge of mingong 民工 migrant workers into the glittering coastal-urban centres of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen – where they were at once both gleefully exploited and discriminated against by the urban denizens. In addition, the province of Henan – since antiquity the breadbasket and civilisational core of China – became saddled down, through a series of high-profile scandals, with the monstrously-unjust stigma of being a poverty- and disease-ridden criminal backwater.

Little wonder, then, that so many of the inhabitants of the Zhongyuan would look back with nostalgia on what they consider to be simpler, more egalitarian, less self-centred times – and that nostalgia clearly has enough currency to translate into a potent political force.

There is something of an irony in this nostalgia, though: an irony which is best illustrated in this story of two deceased officials from Henan: Zhang Qinli and Jiao Yulu, and the battle that still rages over their memory. Zhang Qinli was among the first victims of Deng Xiaoping’s party purges in the wake of the ‘Gang of Four’ trials. He was stripped of his Party membership and imprisoned for 12 years; he thus still stands condemned in Chinese officialdom. However, he remains incredibly popular in his Henan hometown to this day, 12 years after his death, as something of a ‘red saint’. He is remembered for having had the misfortune of backing the ‘wrong side’ and thus being a victim of high-ranking injustice. And he has the additional cachet of having been a fairly scrupulous, earnest, industrious and clean-living official who stands in marked contrast to the sort of corruption which exists in the modern China of more nakedly materialist and consumerist pursuits.

This is a nostalgia which appears to be growing and popular among local Party cadres and even local élites. But, for obvious reasons, it remains an uncomfortable subject for higher-ranking officials of the sort who live in Beijing and Shanghai. It is made all the more uncomfortable because Zhang Qinli’s close associate in Henan Province, the Communist Party Secretary Jiao Yulu, together with whom he tackled the problems of postwar economic underdevelopment, agricultural problems and infrastructure degradation, is still remembered in high official circles as a ‘Revolutionary Martyr’, who has been praised publicly by President Xi Jinping. In fact, after Jiao’s death, Zhang Qinli was responsible primarily for continuing his work improving the living conditions among Henan’s peasantry. The difference between Jiao and Zhang, it is to be remembered, is that Jiao’s early death spared him the ignominy of being associated with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. For local residents of Henan, though, the double standard could not possibly be more glaring.

It is to be remembered that the local Maoist nostalgia that surrounds figures like Zhang Qinli is a loyal nostalgia – loyal, that is, to the ideals which they ascribe (rightly or wrongly) to the founding of the communist Chinese state – but this is a loyalty which Chinese Communist officials, sensitive as they are particularly to internal critics and reformers, seem very willing to do without.

The contours of this Maoist-looking nostalgia are both ironic and tragic. Ironic in that the very system that produced such idealists as Zhang and Jiao, a system which was premised on the need for equality, ended up, under Deng Xiaoping, treating the two monstrously unequally: elevating one as a hero, and imprisoning and dishonouring the other. In one sense, this is not surprising, since revolutions and Thermidorian reactions both have a tendency to eat their own children. On the other hand, though, there is a certain tragedy in it: there is something highly admirable – and not at all wholly-born of the Revolution he was associated with – in the kind of selflessness and love for his countrymen that Zhang is still remembered for in Henan.

(As I have said before multiple times now, I have strong reservations about Mao. Though he is to be credited for some great achievements and improvements in China, what his Cultural Revolution did to good men, good thinkers and good doers like Fei Xiaotong, among many thousands of others, is to my mind simply unforgiveable. And yet the irony shouldn’t be lost that Fei Xiaotong, the tribune of the Chinese peasantry, ill-deserves his ‘rightist’ reputation as much as Zhang Qinli ill-deserves his ‘anti-Party’ one. His care for the peasantry, his communitarian sociology and his economic advice through the 1980’s – for improving peasant life whilst keeping them on their land and retaining some sustainable forms of communal and collective ownership, such as the ‘township and village enterprises’ – all serve to place his work and his memory firmly on the same side as the leftists who are now evoking the image of Mao in their protests. Indeed, no less prominent a Chinese New Left economist than Cui Zhiyuan makes explicit his intellectual debts to Fei Xiaotong! Though the two of them fell victim to the politics of the Cultural Revolution in opposite ways and at different times, Fei Xiaotong is in some ways as much a wrongful victim of political misrepresentation as Zhang Qinli.)

It’s something of a tragedy in itself, that the domestic critics of China’s oppressive and unbalanced economic direction have so few iconic figures other than Mao to draw on. But if you look at the substance of the left’s wishes rather than the style in which they are presented – an end to corruption, an end to regional discrimination, an end to illegal expropriations of land, fair treatment of the poor, a turn away from consumer-capitalist materialism back toward more ‘traditional’ ideals and spirituality – it becomes clear that what they’re really asking for beneath those red banners is a return to something still deeper, older and more meaningful than the Marxist doctrines they represent.

Sacrilege

There’s no other word for it. That’s precisely the word that deserves to be used for what Dakota Access has done.

It is bad enough indeed that the living Indian-rights protesters of Dakota Access have been attacked with dogs (a treatment which apparently hasn’t gone out of fashion since the 1960’s). But the deliberate bulldozing of an area where the dead of the Sioux nation are buried is a direct outrage against tradition, a mortal insult to the memories of the dead, and, from a personalist point of view, an assault on human dignity itself. For we Orthodox Christians and Latin Christians especially, who treat the bodies of the dead with utmost respect and who recognise only the commitment of the dead to the earth as befitting the image of God in which people were fashioned, this act of disturbing earth which has been hallowed by the presence of the buried Sioux ought to be considered all the more dire. In addition, the fact that Dakota Access conscripted its bulldozer operators to commit this ghoulish act of desecration on Labour Day weekend is a gross and deliberate affront to the dignity and the consciences of working men and women. This is not a radical-left concern only; this is a traditionalist concern, as the slogan ‘defend the sacred’ bears witness. When the graves of the dead cannot be held as sacred and worthy of our respect and honour, then nothing can be.

That Dakota Access would do this out of ordinary, simple greed and out of utilitarian concerns is bad enough. But the fact that the company went out of its way, on a nationally-honoured day of rest, to destroy sites sacred to the Sioux who are protesting against them, speaks to a far more demonic influence behind these events – the same manner of demonic influence which has led Daesh to destroy Christian communities and sites sacred to the Christians of the Holy Land. And it is happening now. In the next state over.

Pray for the Standing Rock Sioux. Stand with the Standing Rock Sioux. Dakota Access’s barbarities will not go unmarked in the hereafter, and they should not go unmarked now.

Remembering Righteous Father Maksim (Sandovich), New Hieromartyr of Gorlice

Father and Priest-Martyr Maksim of Gorlice

In the wake of Labour Day – an occasion on which I called some much-deserved attention to the Carpathian Rusins who fought in the IWW and in the UMWA for the dignity of workers in their newfound homeland – it seems only too meet that the Orthodox Church (on the new calendar) should commemorate the glorification of a hard-working priest and martyr of that long-suffering people-without-a-state: Father Maksim Sandovich.

Maksim was born to Timko and Kristína Sandovich in the village of Zhdynya in the Carpathian Mountains (now in Poland, but then part of the Habsburg Monarchy of Austria-Hungary). Though Timko and his wife were farmers, they noticed that Maksim from a very early age had an aptitude for scholarship, and a sincere love of the Church and its prayers. Timko thus sent Maksim to be educated at a normal school in Gorlice, where he enrolled in Russian coursework – learning the Russian language, history, culture, and the history of the Orthodox Church in Russia. Though his parents were fairly well-to-do, the effort to put him through school strained their resources, and Maksim transferred to a monastic school in Kraków out of respect for his parents, not wishing to burden them. This was not, however, to his liking, and he soon left for Russia to enter a novitiate at the Lavra of the Dormition of the Holy Theotokos in Pochaev. The abbot at the Pochaev Lavra introduced the young Maksim to Metropolitan Antoniy (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev and Galicia, who oversaw the promising pupil’s education in the faith, and entered him into the seminary at Zhitomir.

He graduated from the seminary and was entreated by the villagers in his hometown to seek ordination and serve them as a priest. This he did; he was married to a Belarusian woman named Pelageya, and thereafter was ordained in Saint Petersburg in 1911. His sponsor, the good Metropolitan Antony, was aware of the growing persecutions of the Orthodox faithful in German-speaking countries, and told him that he would be welcome as a parish priest in Russia, but Father Maksim insisted on returning to his hometown and serving his own people, the Rusins of the Habsburg Monarchy.

Travelling back to Zhdynya from Zhitomir, he was not received kindly by the Poles who lived in the area. Seeing him in the long beard and cassock of the Orthodox clergy, they mocked him and said amongst themselves, ‘Look – Saint Nicholas has come to the Carpathians!’ His early priesthood would meet with many difficulties and trials: the German authorities refused to allow him to serve the Liturgy, and shut down the residence where he celebrated the Mysteries with his fellow Rusins. He moved to another house, but the Uniate priest nearby complained about the candle smoke, and the Germans arrested all the Rusins they could find who were holding candles, imprisoned them, and fined Father Maksim 400 crowns after a month’s confinement – but even then he did not give up serving the Liturgy or preaching among the Rusins.

The Austrians and the Uniates persecuted the Orthodox Rusins mercilessly, expropriating their cattle or throwing them into debtors’ prison when they could not pay. The Uniate priest Kiselevsky even hindered the burial of an elderly Orthodox woman who had died by having her grave filled in secretly at night before she could be interred, and then when the interment occurred, Kiselevsky and his Uniates disrespected the body by refusing to remove their caps, and blocked the Orthodox from entering the cemetery with the help of the German police. Still further persecutions continued. In the face of charges that he was a Russian spy, Father Maksim proclaimed simply, ‘My only politics is the Gospel’ – and for this answer he was imprisoned for nearly two months.

In the meantime, his mission in the Carpathians attracted more and more men and women from the countryside. It is to be remembered that the Unia was something imposed on the people from above, by city-based Jesuits and the Polish merchant class; in the countryside, many of the Rusins still maintained the Orthodox way even if they had to do so in secret. Among them, word of Father Maksim spread rapidly. So many parishioners filled his little chapel that he soon ran out of candles, and he and his wife had to make a special trip to L’vov to buy more candles and other supplies for the chapel, and to visit his old seminary-school friend Father Ignatius (Gudima). The Habsburg authorities planned to trap him on this trip: both Father Maksim and Father Ignatius were arrested on trumped-up charges of treason and espionage for the Russians. They were held in captivity for two years, while the Habsburg state built up its case against them with all manner of false witnesses and fabricated evidence. A panel of judges assembled to hear the capital case in 1914 failed to find proof of the two Orthodox priests’ espionage, and true witnesses were produced who attested to their innocence.

Father Maksim was released once more, but for all of six weeks. The First World War had erupted between Austria-Hungary and Russia, and immediately following the declaration of war the Austrian gendarmes began making mass arrests of suspected Russian sympathisers, with the help of Ukrainian informants. Father Maksim was one of the first people accused. On 4 August, the Germans arrested Father Maksim, his father Timko, and his pregnant wife Pelageya in their home, marched them to Gorlice and threw them into prison.

On 6 August, the Warden Kalchinsky and Captain Dietrich of Linz, along with four gendarmes and two Austrian militiamen, came for Father Maksim. They blindfolded him and bound his wrists, in spite of the saintly Father’s gentle protestations that they were not needful, and that he would go with them wherever they wished. The gendarmes paraded him before the crowd, but Father Maksim went with Christlike meekness to his end, praying to God. Captain Dietrich marked his cassock with chalk, then gave the signal. As he was shot, Father Maksim cried out: ‘Long live the Orthodox Rus’!’ But even though he had been mortally wounded, the martyred priest remained standing. Dietrich, panicking, drew a revolver and fired it three times into Father Maksim’s head, and then shoved him so that he would fall over. After the brutal summary execution, the gendarmes prepared a rough coffin and buried Father Maksim without any ceremony in an unmarked hole in Gorlice Cemetery. Only in 1922 would Timko Sandovich obtain permission from the new Polish government to disinter his son’s body and bury it properly in Zhdynya.

Father Saint Maksim’s memory was cherished by his fellow Rusins, even as the war dragged on and many of them, including his pregnant widow Pelageya, suffered in the Austrian concentration camp at Talerhof. Matushka Pelageya was fortunate; she survived the horrors of Talerhof and gave birth to Saint Maksim’s son, named in his father’s honour – who would become a priest later in his life and faithfully serve a growing, spiritually-thriving Rusin flock as his father had done. The Rusins still venerate Father Maksim, whose tireless efforts and steadfast endurance of persecution even to his death, mirroring the passions of Christ Our God, have continued to give them strength even in the most trying circumstances.

By the Providence of God you were sent to the Mountain of Pochaev
For the knowledge of the truth of the Orthodox faith,
And receiving true teaching in the city of Zhitomir,
As a soldier of Christ you came to our land.
For Orthodoxy and your own people you accepted a martyr's crown.
Therefore you confirmed your native land in Orthodoxy.
O Priest-Martyr Maksim, entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved!

Worthy of his hire

A photograph of early Pennsylvanian Carpatho-Rusin immigrants,
many of whom were heavily involved in 19^th-century labour disputes

From a Christian perspective, labour in itself is not an absolute value. It is blessed when it represents co-working with the Lord and contribution to the realisation of His design for the world and man. However, labour is not something pleasing to God if it is intended to serve the egoistic interests of individual or human communities and to meet the sinful needs of the spirit and flesh.

Holy Scriptures points to the two moral motives of labour: work to sustain oneself without being a burden for others and work to give to the needy. The apostle writes: ‘Let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth’ (Eph. 4:28). Such labour cultivates the soul and strengthens the body and enables the Christian to express his faith in God-pleasing works of charity and love of his neighbours (Mt. 5:16; James 2:17). Everyone remembers the words of St. Paul: ‘If any would not work, neither should he eat’ (2 Thes. 3:10).

The Fathers and Doctors of the Church continuously stressed the moral meaning of labour. Thus, St. Clement of Alexandria described it as ‘a school of social justice’…

A worker has the right to use the fruits of his labour: ‘Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? Who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock?… He that ploweth should plow in hope; and he that threshesth in hope should be partaker of his hope’ (1 Cor. 9:7, 10). The Church teaches that refusal to pay for honest work is not only a crime against man, but also a sin before God.

Holy Scriptures says: ‘Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant… At his day thou shalt give him his hire… lest he cry against thee unto the Lord, and it be sin unto thee’ (Deut. 24:14-15); ‘Woe unto him… that useth his neighbour’s services without wages, and giveth him not for his work’ (Jer. 22:13); ‘Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth’ (James 5:4).

At the same time, by God’s commandment workers are ordered to take care of those who for various reasons cannot earn their living, such as the weak, the sick, strangers (refugees), orphans and widows. The worker should share the fruits of his work with them, ‘that the Lord may bless thee in all the work of thine hands’ (Deut. 24:19-22).

Continuing on earth the service of Christ Who identified Himself with the destitute, the Church always comes out in defence of the voiceless and powerless. Therefore, she calls upon society to ensure the equitable distribution of the fruits of labour, in which the rich support the poor, the healthy the sick, the able-bodied the elderly. The spiritual welfare and survival of society are possible only if the effort to ensure life, health and minimal welfare for all citizens becomes an indisputable priority in distributing the material resources.

VI. 4 and 6, Basis of the Social Concept
of the Russian Orthodox Church

The rights of labour to the fruits of their own work, to this day, have still not been recognised or fully honoured by modern societies, and the struggle for ‘life, health and minimal welfare’ still rages for many of us. It is worthy of note that the first Labour Day celebrations in the United States and Canada came swiftly on the heels of the Pullman Strike, which ended as so many labour struggles on this continent have, with the blood of at least 30 workers being spilled brutally and callously by American federal marshals in concert with the corporations which bribed them; and the Democratic president who signed the holiday into law did so partially to quell the threat of further strikes and protests in the future, similar to what happened at Haymarket eight years before that. Even so, this holiday is one where we stand and recognise the workers who sought – not even necessarily revolution, but to satisfy the basic needs commensurate with what Holy Mother Church considers to be a dignified existence.

It is also a holiday when we must remember that the Orthodox clergy in North America were already deeply involved with the labour movement. Patriarch Saint Tikhon (Bellavin) of Moscow, then Bishop of the Russian Church in America, actively gave money to unionised workers to be used when they went on strike, and encouraged Orthodox Christians in San Francisco to do the same. And of course, Father Saint Alexis (Tovt) of Wilkes-Barre, during his life, was also an active and ardent supporter of the labour movement, particularly among the Carpathian Rusin miners who made up so much of his flock. These Orthodox immigrant miners themselves were often members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and the United Mine Workers of America – the two labour organisations of the turn of the century which would allow immigrants to join their ranks.

For all those who lost their lives in the struggle for their families and for dignified treatment from the government and from their employers – may God make their memories to be eternal!

Remembering Holy Hieromartyr Athanasius the Abbot of Brest-Litovsk, Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in Poland and Lithuania

Igumen Saint Athanasius of Brest-Litovsk

We remember today the blessed martyr, Igumen Saint Athanasius (Filipovich) of Brest-Litovsk, the steadfast and learned monastic who together with his monastery resisted the Union of Brest, and who fell victim both to the hatred of the Jesuits and to the vagaries of Russian border politics.

Athanasius is the ecclesiastical name of this gentle monk, but we do not know his earthly name. We do know, however, that he was born around 1597 to a fairly well-to-do Belarusian family, and that he was tutored by an Orthodox parish school from a very early age, and later graduated from a Jesuit university. He kept a diary in his youth, and had a remarkable gift for languages, being knowledgeable in Greek and Latin as well as in Polish and White Russian. He made his living as a court tutor for the Polish-Lithuanian Chancellor’s family, as well as for those of several merchants of the realm. However, he found his monastic vocation in Vilnius, where in 1627 he joined the Monastery attached to the Church of the Holy Spirit, and later the Holy Ascension Monastery in Dubovsk, where he was ordained a hieromonk. This monastery was seized by the Jesuits not four years later, however, and the monks of Dubovsk were relocated to Kupiaticka.

Athanasius distinguished himself as a monk by his care for his brothers and for the poor. On one occasion as he was travelling outside the monastery he met a lame man and bore him up on his back. This lame man spoke with him about matters of faith, and Athanasius took this incident as a sign from God that his podvig would be to struggle for the Orthodox way in the Polish and Lithuanian lands.

At another time, he was tasked with finding donors to his Monastery for the task of rebuilding the Church of the Ikon of the Mother of God. He prayed before this ikon, and the Blessed Virgin appeared to him, telling him to go to the court of Mikhail Feodorovich, the Tsar of Russia, for help in building the Church; and he obeyed. The journey was long, arduous and dangerous, given the lawlessness that prevailed in that time on account of the Thirty Years’ War; but under the protection of the Mother of God, Athanasius reached Moscow in safety and was welcomed warmly by the Tsar, who proceeded to make a generous donation for the rebuilding of the church at Kupiaticka.

In 1640, Hieromonk Athanasius was elected to be the Igumen (Abbot) of the Monastery of Saint Simeon in Brest, where he would live out the rest of his life struggling on behalf of the Orthodox Christians who lived in that city, who were discriminated against by the authorities for their faith and who were constantly being harangued by the Jesuits who sought to convert them to the Unia. Moved to pity for them, he exhorted the Orthodox believers of Brest to be strong in their faith, and eventually, again guided by the Holy Theotokos, he went before the Polish sejm. Taking the icon of the Mother of God of Kupiaticka and the cross with him, he appeared in Warsaw before the Polish noblemen and king, and he spoke out loudly against the Jesuits and the Union of Brest, saying that the Mother of God had warned him of God’s displeasure that the Orthodox Christians of Brest were so persecuted.

For his daring to speak thus before the Polish king, Saint Athanasius was thrown into the dungeons and pronounced mentally ill, though in fact the good monk was simply following in the Russian tradition of yurodstvo - ‘foolishness for Christ’. On the day of Christ’s baptism, he escaped from the dungeon and went out into the cold streets of Warsaw wearing nothing but a cloak and cowl, running into the Latin churches and warning them of the punishment of God. The authorities were called, and they had him flogged and kicked, then thrown into a ditch. A Polish judge stripped him of his abbatial office and even of his status as a hieromonk, a judgement which was to be confirmed by Metropolitan Peter of Kiev. However, the Metropolitan refused to condemn the holy hieromonk, and reinstated Athanasius as the Igumen of Saint Simeon Monastery.

The persecutions of Orthodox believers in Brest resumed, however, and riots instigated by the Jesuits made it impossible for the Orthodox clergy to hold Divine Liturgy in their own churches. For a third time the Mother of God appeared to Saint Athanasius; once again he was sent to plead the case of the Orthodox believers before the Polish King; and once again he was thrown into prison: this time on a trumped-up charge that he had conspired against the Polish kingdom when on his visit to Russia to raise funds for the Church. During his second imprisonment he wrote lengthy epistles to the Polish king denouncing the Unia, reminding the king of his promise of religious tolerance in his realm, and pleading that the Orthodox believers might be permitted to worship in peace; but the most the Polish king would do was to release him to Metropolitan Peter on the understanding that he would spend the rest of his days in Kiev and never again return to Brest as a monk or a priest. The Metropolitan gladly welcomed his brother in Christ, and Athanasius stayed at the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev as long as Metropolitan Peter remained alive. But he returned to Brest in 1647 upon the Metropolitan’s repose.

When the Rising of the Zaporozhian Cossacks occurred the following year, Athanasius was taken prisoner for a third and final time, and charged, without a shred of proof, with having provided material support to the Cossacks in the form of smuggling gunpowder through the Monastery (sadly a common charge against Orthodox churches by the Uniates even to this day). When no proof of materiel-smuggling was found in the search of the monastery, Athanasius was then charged with profaning the Latin Church and the Unia. When he again denounced the Unia before his interrogators, he was thrown into prison, where the Jesuits alternately threatened him with torture and cajoled him with freedom, if he would join the Uniates. The holy monk refused to renounce his faith, crying aloud, ‘Anathema to the Union!’. On 5 September 1648, the monk was taken from the castle by the Polish soldiery into the forests outside of Brest, tortured cruelly with red-hot coals, flaying and burning, and forced to watch as his grave was dug. One last time he was told to renounce the Orthodox faith, and he refused. The soldier who was ordered to carry out the execution, seeing the steadfastness of the holy martyr, knelt before him and asked Athanasius’s forgiveness, before shooting him twice in the head. This failed to kill the holy saint, however, and the soldiers threw him into the open grave. The holy hieromartyr managed to cross his arms before he landed in the grave and was buried alive.

The students at the monastery school at Saint Simeon described that night as one of terror for them; though not a cloud appeared in the sky, sounds of thunder were heard and flashes of lightning were seen. It was over eight months before the monks of Saint Simeon dared to leave the city and look for the body of their igumen, having been told by a local boy where the monk had been executed; they had to steal out in secret to dig up Saint Athanasius’s relics because the land still belonged to the Jesuits. When they dug up his body at last, his relics were shown to be free of corruption, and he was moved into the monastery and given a proper burial there.

The relics of Holy Hieromartyr Athanasius have been translated several times. The Monastery of Saint Simeon suffered a fire in 1815; the relics were found to be intact and reinterred beneath the altar when the church was rebuilt, eventually moved into the sarcophagus so the parishioners could pray over the relics. In 1893, the relics were transferred to the church named in the Hieromartyr’s honour in Grodno; and some of the relics were subsequently moved to an Orthodox convent in the bordering province of Lublin; when the nuns were relocated first to Siberia and then to Paris, the relics of Saint Athanasius went with them, before being restored to Lublin in 1996. The courage, the steadfastness in the Faith, and the love for the persecuted by which the holy monk lived his life are virtues for which all Orthodox Christians should strive; and Saint Athanasius of Brest-Litovsk remains a beloved source of inspiration for Russian and Polish Orthodox Christians alike.

Holy Hieromartyr Athanasius, Confessor of Orthodoxy, pray to God for us sinners!