Against all utopias

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev

Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Philosophy of Inequality, sent to me most kindly by his translator Fr Stephen (Janos), has been a rather guilty pleasure to read – almost an indulgence, really. It is an angry jeremiad, written at the very fever pitch of the Russian Revolution – and a wholly, unabashedly and self-consciously reactionary document, which is what gives it its peculiar power and persuasiveness. Berdyaev, who is not satisfied with anything less than a politics of the Resurrection, sorties forth and does savage intellectual battle with every possible manner of sæcular political utopianism. It is no accident, I think, that Aldous Huxley credits Berdyaev and honours him with the epigraphical quote on the inner cover of Brave New World, and chooses a quote of his (not from Philosophy of Inequality but instead from The End of Our Time, which came out a year later) that directly challenges the very nature and self-understanding of such utopianisms:

Les utopies apparaissent bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: comment éviter leur réalisation définitive … Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique moins parfaite et plus libre.

Utopias seem to be much more realisable than we formerly believed them to be. Now we find ourselves presented with another alarming question: how do we prevent their definitive realisation? …Utopias are realisable. Life marches toward utopias. Perhaps a new century will begin, a century in which intellectuals and the cultivated class will dream of ways to evict utopias and return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free.

I’ve already written a little bit about how Berdyaev – often associated, including by myself, with anarchism – in fact rejected anarchism in a way similar and in several ways parallel to that offered by William Morris. But he ranges much further in his jeremiad. He rejects not only anarchism, but also liberalism, democracy and particularly socialism – again, one must remember that this is in response to the Russian Revolution – and indeed descends to the very roots of utopian thinking, opposing an artificially-unlimited horizon of politics (fictionalised and abstracted) with the growth patterns of history:

Your sociological worldview was always detached from genuine historical activity. And therefore it was merely rationalistic and utopian. Ye isolated your societal aspect not only from the worldly cosmos, but also from the historical cosmos. In your theories ye abstractly subordinated man to the natural and social medium, ye rejected his spiritual freedom and transformed him into a passive reflection of the natural and social cycle. Yet you however have declared, that man of himself arbitrarily and in a break with the past can begin a history, in accord with your adjusted intents. Ye have loved to speak about “leaping from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom”, which is made by this slave of the social medium, a reflection of natural necessity… By you everything has been rendered abstract—abstracted, rationalised is your necessity, and abstracted, rationalised is your freedom, whereby the living man and living history have all vanished into abstractions.

A few of the themes I’ve been thinking on, and indeed fumbling toward, in this blog, are presented in bold print here in The Philosophy of Inequality. His meditation on the question of nation – neither an endorsement of nationalism as an ideology and still far less a condemnation of it – manages to encapsulate and elucidate some of my own doubts and struggles to grasp the concept. For Berdyaev, nations are not artificial tracts of territory, not arbitrary agglomerations of people, but living organisms that span multiple generations and grasp at immortality. Berdyaev does indeed condemn those nationalisms that go ‘false at the roots’, that lose their grounding in creative religious impulses or that abstract themselves into anti-personal identity politics. But he asserts a sacral mystery of blood and the love of child for parent as the kernel of national feeling, and boldly asserts that nations, invested as they are with personal character, indeed have some creative purpose to reveal within history. Likewise Berdyaev defends the state as having both a creative and a caritative purpose – indeed, he paraphrases Solovyov to the effect that the state exists not to make of Earth a paradise, but to make it less of a hell for the less fortunate.

Berdyaev’s thoughts on war also mirror and echo Solovyov’s – both for better and for worse. Writing at the close of the First World War, he explicitly denounces the pacifism of Tolstoy as a philistine ‘lie and a deception’, a thinly-veiled disavowal of the immortality of the soul. More importantly, he takes pacifists to task for opposing war only during its commission, instead of doing spiritual battle with the malices, hatreds, prides and petty vengeances in peacetime that give rise to war. And even in 1917, he takes the democratic idealists to task for desiring the ‘end of history’, for desiring a this-worldly order of bourgeois states united in a philistine outward peace while the inner man remains untransformed. (This is Berdyaev deliberately rebelling against Kant.) Here the influence of Nietzsche is strongly felt. Berdyaev fears that in the world the pacifists want, the ‘lofty’, ‘noble’ aristocratic-martial virtues will be lost; only a smug philistine and bourgeois ethos of grasping and cheating will be left. (Sadly, he seems to have appropriated here the rather odious racist historical theorising of Solovyov. Blessedly, Berdyaev grows out of that in his later work.)

Berdyaev is still a challenging read, particularly to someone like me given to what Berdyaev’s compatriot and friend Mother Maria (Skobtsova) called ‘wingèd visions’. It’s not an accident that I mention William Morris above. Even though Berdyaev deploys a number of the standard arguments against socialism and enforced collectivism in his broadside, at the same time he seems to stand closer to the non-sectarian æstheticism of Morris, even than to previous Russian critics of socialism (like Boris Chicherin, whom he mentions by name).

Despite his appeals to freedom of conscience, to free charity in contraposition to a forced levelling, in his objections to socialism he never once makes appeal to the sorts of œconomistic arguments so beloved by the libertarians. Indeed, he scorns them, seeing in them the very roots of the levelling impulse – and blesses the struggle against capital (itself an abstraction from the proper rôle and situation of concrete productive property) when it denies the ‘sacred rights’ of labour, which does and ought to have a religious significance! Instead of the atheistic socialism of the revolution he decries, he appeals to the ‘aristocratic socialism’ of Plato, and the ‘English socialism’ of John Ruskin.

Berdyaev rails most vehemently against the socialists, those ‘murderers of mankind’. In this one senses the umbrage and the anger of the newly-disabused ex-Marxist, who has not abandoned the moralistic outrage which drove him to embrace Marxism in the first place. But we see hints of a thread that is common to Russian radicals and reactionaries both, of a certain stripe: Pobedonostsev, Dostoevsky, Solovyov, Fedotov, now Berdyaev. The socialists, even when they are seen as the enemy, are – in Berdyaev’s words – ‘prodigal sons’. They have spurned God, they have rejected God, they have declared themselves dead to God and demanded their share of the inheritance of His Kingdom: that inheritance being the demand for an earthly justice, the Kingdom of God come to earth. And for this they are willing to cut themselves off from God and, just as the prodigal son himself does in the parable, debase themselves to the level of pigs. And for this Berdyaev castigates them.

But in his anger Berdyaev reveals (whether intentionally or not is unclear) the psychological truth that Dostoevsky came to about the socialists, and to which the latter philosopher himself would refer in his later work. Dostoevsky was a studier of souls. And for Dostoevsky, whose Raskolnikov, protagonist of Crime and Punishment, was the very psychological ‘type’ of the socialist, there is indeed a redemptive streak, some noble and worthy aspect in the soul such that he ‘comes to himself’ and opens to salvation, even though the resentful soul of the unrepentant Raskolnikov is full of hatred and murder. Raskolnikov can and does repent, in a way that – for example – the narrator of Notes from Underground cannot.

Even in translation, this comes across clearly as a book written by a young, understandably-angry and disillusioned man. My worry about Berdyaev here – and this jeremiad is indeed very much so the cry of a ‘young man of talent’ in the face of an oppressive state – is precisely that he displays the psychological features of the untutored Glaucon in The Republic. Berdyaev puts forward a philosophical justification for inequality, in precisely the same way that Glaucon objects to the egalitarian ‘city of utmost necessity’ erected by his brother Adeimantus. Glaucon bridles, revolts, against the idea of the life of ‘pigs’ in such a city; Berdyaev likewise disdains the materialistic striving, the ‘interests’ that cannot be avoided within the utopian visions of his day. And within this young Berdyaev stands another philosophical doubt entertained by Glaucon after the denunciation of Socrates by Thrasymachus. ‘Justice’ is never a word spoken positively by Berdyaev here; in it he sees only the pretences of utopians and rationalists. Perhaps he suspects, in the revolutionary climate in which he finds himself, that an enforced ‘justice’ is never an end desired for itself, but instead a justification for tyrants to exercise their will to power. Berdyaev is breathless in his own denunciations of his ‘contemners’. He strives after an ‘aristocratic’ ideal of Christian love, is painfully aware of its tragic inability to be realised within a fallen world, and is weighed down by a sense of history and art that recalls Glaucon’s drift back to the poets, particularly Homer. But for Glaucon there is hope! And Berdyaev’s more mature work is indeed philosophical, attuned to the ironies of the socialists’ position in Russian history.

One hundred years on and from another national vantage-point, The Philosophy of Inequality is still relevant, for the same reasons that Huxley is – and not merely because Putin has it on his required reading list. We ought not to fall into the smug philistine idea that we are beyond utopian temptations – least of all those of us who think our rationality most protects us from them. We live in just such a realised utopia, with nationalism, liberalism and democracy (far less so socialism, in the sense Berdyaev meant it) still warring for relevance on terms which have been abstracted so far from our everyday lives it seems like a reality show, and has turned into one. Our hazy utopian daydreaming has turned it into one. The utopianism is crumbling around the edges, but it is far from collapsed – we have ready-made constituencies willing to shore up various corners of it, waving various flags. Our political utopianism functions as a kind of wilful daydream, one in which the past is only hazily (if at all) remembered through the electronic filter of social media. Actually-existing inequality is rampant, yet it is of a faceless, groundless, hyperrationalised kind which arises from and sweeps into the very Ungrund against which Berdyaev militates; it is the result of utopian thinking, not a standing rebuke against it or still less a remedy from it.

Arabia tristis

Once again, Yemen is on the brink of a massive cholera outbreak, indeed, the third in its recent history, a direct result of the flagitious aggression being perpetrated upon it by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and NATO. This in addition to the direct bombing campaigns that are targeting needed infrastructure and supply lines and killing dozens of civilians on a weekly basis. Let there be no mistake; let there be no obfuscation. Despite the self-serving lies of organs aligned with a particular side of the conflict, both sides are not equally at fault. The responsibility for this crisis lies not with the Houthis and the Yemeni Shia tribesmen, but squarely with the Saudi-led ‘coalition’. Of course, the pro-establishment wings of both parties would rather not mention it, but my nation’s executive branch, legislature and military-industrial complex are all deeply complicit in this systematic deprivation and brutalisation against some of the poorest people on the planet.

None of this should be news to my gentle readers. My apologies, by the way, for making these outraged blog-rants on Yemen read like so many Wikipedia articles with all the links; please understand that my outrage is well-sourced. Those of you who read my blog on a regular basis already know my stance on ‘humanitarian interventions’ by NATO member nations in general, but at this point, the disturbing thing is that no one has even tried to justify this intervention on any kind of moral ground whatsoever, but the war continues anyway, with the Biblical ‘least of these’ by any measure we might apply – the poor, refugees, widows, orphans – squarely in the cross-hairs.

Other commentators with more experience and better knowledge than I have can be read for the historian’s-eye view of the conflict. The only thing I can really add here is that, from a religious perspective, Yemen is every bit as ancient and every bit as significant as Syria is, with a rich and storied physical and written religious history going back to the sons of Noah. Here as in Syria, it is difficult to avoid suspecting that the wanton and heinous acts of destruction and plunder which the grasping iconoclastic puritan bigots in Riyadh are undertaking are aimed as much at this material history as they are at the people. In any event, the history and the people of Yemen are tied together; they are in the exact same plight.

All-Holy, Most Blessed Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, whom as we remember during this fasting season is the ‘shelter of orphans, and intercessor of travellers, strangers and pilgrims, joy of those in sorrow, protectress of the wronged’, is assuredly together with the orphans, the displaced, the sorrowing and the wronged in Yemen, doing her best to comfort and protect them as she sees fit. The season of fasting is also the season of prayer and of almsgiving. What the Yemenis desperately need now is not merely humanitarian aid – which is also direly needed, but much of which simply doesn’t arrive where it’s needed thanks to the blockade – but instead for the bombs to stop falling. I strongly encourage the readers of my blog to donate to one of the following groups working and advocating for peace in Yemen: Win Without War, Peace Action, the Campaign Against Arms Trade or United for Peace and Justice. Most Holy Theotokos, intercede with your Son to forgive us for our sins, both individually and as a nation.

UPDATE: The figures for the casualties from the most recent bombardment of hospitals and markets in al-Hudayda by Saudi-led forces have risen to 60 dead, and 140 wounded. Ya Rabo irham.

The Holy Maccabee Martyrs

Saint Salome, Saint Eleazar and the Seven Maccabee Martyrs

A radical Catholic friend of mine, a certain Ms H—, recently asked me to translate a prayer for the upcoming Dormition Fast, the Tsaritse moya preblagaya, from Church Slavonic into English. The prayer in the original Slavonic goes as follows:

Царице моя преблагая, надеждо моя Богородице, приятелище сирых и странных предстaтельнице, скорбящих рaдосте, обидимых покровительнице! Зриши мою беду, зриши мою скорбь, помози ми яко немощну, окорми мя яко стрaнна. Обиду мою веси, разреши ту, яко волиши: яко не имам иныя помощи разве Тебе, ни иныя предстaтельницы, ни благия утешительницы, токмо Тебе, о Богомaти, яко да сохраниши мя и покрыеши во веки веков. Аминь.

Now, I’m no CS scholar, so my clumsy translation, kludged together and reverse-engineered from my beginner-level knowledge of Russian and Slovak, got most of the meaning across but hardly did the prayer justice. Thankfully, I went back and found another, more suitable one here:

My most gracious Queen, my hope, Mother of God, shelter of orphans, and intercessor of travellers, strangers and pilgrims, joy of those in sorrow, protectress of the wronged, see my distress, see my affliction! Help me, for I am helpless. Feed me, for I am a stranger and pilgrim. Thou knowest my offence; forgive and resolve it as thou wilt. For I know no other help but thee, no other intercessor, no gracious consoler but thee, O Mother of God, to guard and protect me throughout the ages. Amen.

This prayer, which puts seemingly equal emphasis on the Virgin Mary’s glory and also on her identification with and love for the hopeless and helpless, somehow clicked with me as I remembered that the eve of the Dormition Fast (when we celebrate her falling asleep) coincides with the feast of Saint Salome, her seven sons and their teacher Saint Eleazar. The hagiography of these Holy Maccabee Martyrs is related thus on the OCA website:

The seven holy Maccabee martyrs Abim, Antonius, Gurias, Eleazar, Eusebonus, Alimus and Marcellus, their mother Solomonia and their teacher Eleazar suffered in the year 166 before Christ under the impious Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. This foolish ruler loved pagan and Hellenistic customs, and held Jewish customs in contempt. He did everything possible to turn people from the Law of Moses and from their covenant with God. He desecrated the Temple of the Lord, placed a statue of the pagan god Zeus there, and forced the Jews to worship it. Many people abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but there were also those who continued to believe that the Savior would come.

A 90-year-old elder, the scribe and teacher Eleazar, was brought to trial for his faithfulness to the Mosaic Law. He suffered tortures and died at Jerusalem.

The disciples of Saint Eleazar, the seven Maccabee brothers and their mother Solomonia, also displayed great courage. They were brought to trial in Antioch by King Antiochus Epiphanes. They fearlessly acknowledged themselves as followers of the True God, and refused to eat pig’s flesh, which was forbidden by the Law.

The eldest brother acted as spokesmen for the rest, saying that they preferred to die rather than break the Law. He was subjected to fierce tortures in sight of his brothers and their mother. His tongue was cut out, he was scalped, and his hands and feet were cut off. Then a cauldron and a large frying pan were heated, and the first brother was thrown into the frying pan, and he died.

The next five brothers were tortured one after the other. The seventh and youngest brother was the last one left alive. Antiochus suggested to Saint Solomonia to persuade the boy to obey him, so that her last son at least would be spared. Instead, the brave mother told him to imitate the courage of his brothers.

The child upbraided the king and was tortured even more cruelly than his brothers had been. After all her seven children had died, Saint Solomonia, stood over their bodies, raised up her hands in prayer to God and died.

The martyric death of the Maccabee brothers inspired Judas Maccabeus, and he led a revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes. With God’s help, he gained the victory, and then purified the Temple at Jerusalem. He also threw down the altars which the pagans had set up in the streets. All these events are related in the Second Book of Maccabees.

The OCA hagiography goes on to note that the story of the Maccabee martyrs was a particularly popular subject for both Western Church Fathers like Saint Ambrose of Milan, and Eastern Church Fathers like Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Gregory the Theologian. It is noteworthy to read Saint John’s panegyric on the Maccabee martyrs, how he frames it in order to subvert the traditional Greek-pagan notions of aretē: likening these seven children, an old man and an old woman to athletes in gymnastic and gladiatorial competition, he deliberately contrasts them with the image of gifted youths with splendid shining bodies, blessed by nature with physical prowess. In words he portrays Saint Solomonia, wearied on her walking-stick, spent from seven childbirths, rising in spirit to the supreme feat of witnessing the sufferings of her sons before going to her own death without complaint. Saint John dares the laughter and contempt of the Greek pagans in this comparison; he defies them to produce a feat of gymnastic or gladiatorial valour worthy of matching that faced by this pitiable collection of elderly, of women and children. Virtue, Saint John declares, is not a matter of moral luck, belonging only to men of health and wealth:

Whereas in the games in the outside world, they scrutinise both age and gender and status, and entry to them is closed off to slaves and women and old men and adolescents, here the theatre is opened up with complete safety to every status, every age, each gender, so that you might learn in full the generosity and ineffable power of the One who set up the contest, and see that apostolic remark certified in practice: “His power is perfected in weakness” (II Cor 12:9).

The pathos that Saint John Chrysostom gives to Saint Salome – and this is no accident, with Saint John being as erudite as he is – is the exact same pathos that the Mother of God bore when witnessing the Crucifixion of her own Son. Saint Salome suffered seven deaths – those of each of her children in turn – before she suffered her own. He diminishes neither the natural love a mother feels for her children, nor the steadfastness with which she urges them to stand up to the wicked Antiochus. The suffering of Saint Salome is a ‘type’, a prefiguration, of the suffering of the Theotokos, beholding her son’s death. Within the context of the church calendar, then, we begin the Dormition Fast of the Theotokos with the awareness of the suffering she herself felt at Golgotha.

The praises Saint John employs, particularly in their ironic comparison to the gladiatorial spectacles he condemns elsewhere, additionally bear witness to the greater historical irony of the story of the Maccabee martyrs. It wasn’t just any old tyrant which Saints Eleazar and Salome and her seven children faced: Antiochus was one of the heirs of Alexander the Great, and thus also Aristotle – the pinnacle of a single, unified Hellenistic world-civilisation, the bearer of universal values. The martyrdom of these politically-Persophile Judæo-Syrians, the Maccabees, is the first glimmer we witness of the world-historical process which Saint Il’ya Bunakov understands as the ‘awakening of the East’, a spiritual revolt that is in fact deepened and completed in Jesus Christ, the Messiah of the world. Additional layers of historical irony lie in the fact that these anti-imperialist saints had their cult appropriated by a Christianised Roman Empire. Saint Salome, Saint Eleazar, and the Seven Maccabee Martyrs – pray to God for us sinners!

Let us praise the seven Maccabees,
With their mother Salome and their teacher Eleazar;
They were splendid in lawful contest
As guardians of the teachings of the Law.
Now as Christ’s holy martyrs
They ceaselessly intercede for the world.

Minneapolis, miners and folk memory

Part 4 of my Here-hood Saints series

Last year my family and I lived in the Summit Hill neighbourhood of Saint Paul. Specifically, we lived in an apartment complex that, for all intents and purposes, might have been in Mac-Groveland except that it sat on the eastern bank of Ayd Mill Road. East of us yet was the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Paul. I have a habit of flipping the Cathedral an ironic, if heartfelt, salute every time we go past (which, the cathedral being located on the eastern end of University Avenue, we did often when we lived in Saint Paul). It was, after all, the seat and the great project of Archbishop John Ireland, who may be considered the originator of my church – the Orthodox Church in America.

The story of how the great reversion of Rusin immigrants into the Metropolia came about from the Archbishop’s rather impolitic behaviour to a certain immigrant priest is an infamous one these days, and it can be read in full elsewhere; suffice it to say that the troubles Rusins have historically had with ill-tempered Irish bosses does go back a rather long way. But our Bat’ko, Father Saint Alexis (Tovt), having been rebuffed by the local bishop here in the Twin Cities and threatened with being recalled to Austria-Hungary, went instead to the Russian bishop in San Francisco to be received into the Orthodox Church. Holy Father Alexis then went on to evangelise, bringing fifteen parishes with over twenty thousand Rusin-American immigrants back into the Orthodox Church. One of the churches Father Alexis founded was St. Mary’s Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Cathedral, pictured in my blog header. At Saint Herman’s on the Sunday of Orthodoxy I’ve made it a habit these past two years to bring my icon of Father Saint Alexis, which seems particularly fitting, given that he and his parish were baptised on that Sunday in 1891.

It’s a little weird living and going to church, as it were, at what is essentially ground zero for a mass conversion that transformed a large number of Greek-Catholic parishes into Orthodox ones over a relatively short period of time. Also, if on occasion I am hard on the Uniates (those of whom I’ve met locally being incredibly nice people), please understand that it is partly because ‘Minnesota nice’ can actually mask a lot of historical violence beneath the surface. The mass-reversion of the (mostly mine-working families) Rusin immigrants to Orthodoxy all along the Rust Belt is no exception to this rule. The conversion of Father Saint Alexis to Orthodoxy was not greeted meekly, tamely or peaceably – not by the Catholic hierarchy and certainly not by churchmen who remained in communion with Rome. It is instructive to read Father Alexis’s sermons and letters. In the immediate wake of the return of the Minnesotan (and Pennsylvanian) Rusin-Americans to Orthodoxy, there were a number of violent incidents. Threats were issued. Churches which reverted to Orthodoxy were vandalised – bricks thrown through windows, collection boxes robbed, a guard dog poisoned. Saint Alexis even survived an assassination attempt by a Uniate fanatic. At some point the Uniates realised that if Father Alexis Tovt was killed, it would make him a martyr for the cause of Orthodoxy in America, but they continued to attack the reverting Orthodox churches through the press, and through their coffers – a tactic which seems to have been at least partially effective. The letters of Father Alexis are filled with the prosaic and rather sad details of how his churches had to scrounge up paltry amounts of cash by selling off church goods and relying on support from San Francisco in order to meet court costs and legal fees.

In any event, the experiences of the working-class Rusin immigrants in these churches are not entirely gone. The old folk memory is there, particularly among the older laypeople in the parishes of the OCA and ACROD. It has been interesting to me to observe that the Rusin-Americans are insistent that they are not Ukrainian; they actually don’t mind being called ‘Slovaks’, but their sense of belonging – very much like that of the Jews who were their neighbours – is one that doesn’t fit neatly within nation-state boundaries. During the time of the migration across the Atlantic, the Rusin people were caught on the boundaries of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Before then, they had been robbed, enslaved, beaten and oppressed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This folk history has been remembered in a fragmented way: stories handed down from the babushki about life in the old country; or habits kept out of fear of the police or of famine. One older Rusin-American friend of mine said she’d heard ‘Lemko’ (referring to a linguistic subdivision of the Rusin people) was used as a term of disparagement (this is something I couldn’t, in my limited knowledge, confirm or refute).

Just as some more radical Jews began in 19^th century Russia and Poland to think of themselves as doyiker, the Ruthenian Orthodox peoples of the Commonwealth and the Monarchy were simply ‘tutešni’, which means the same thing: ‘people from here’. Their ‘here-hood’ was in part an imposition, but also in part stemmed from an unwillingness to form a political-linguistic identity which fit into the ideological boxes provided to them by their colonial masters. To be ‘tutešni’ is to be neither ‘Ukrainian’ nor ‘Russian’ nor ‘Hungarian’ nor ‘Slovak’ nor ‘Polish’.

The ecclesiastical-political orientation of the mission of Father Saint Alexis Tovt among the Rusins was accused of having a ‘Russophile’ or ‘Moscophile’ flavour by his enemies in the streets, in the courtroom and in the press. The Rusins who ‘went over’ – or ‘perekhodyty’, in the polemical language of the Uniate press – to Orthodoxy were accused of being a potentially-traitorous fifth column for Russia, a charge which was opportunistically credited on account of their involvement in labour disputes. (Sound familiar?) Indeed, he speaks of these accusations specifically in his sermons, and attempts to hold out for a surprisingly nuanced position. On the one hand, he commemorates the Russian Tsar as a patron of his church. Further, he speaks of the need for his people – whether they call themselves Slovaks or Russians – to demonstrate material kindness and brotherly solidarity to other immigrants in America, particularly those from other Slavic countries. On the other hand, he encouraged his parish to learn English, not to drink or party to excess, to attend public schools and to support the labour movement. There were two sides to his civic thinking; even if he didn’t embrace assimilation with both arms, neither did he give in to an implicit anarchism or allow himself to be cowed by his detractors into a reactive stance. Being the ‘people from here’ who are also self-consciously migrants (physically, civilly, religiously) is a tenuous position indeed.

There are several other noteworthy parallels I could – and will eventually – mention between the Moravian Jewish family connexions I seem to keep coming back to, and the Rusin(-American) experience. However, the (self-?) designation as ‘tutešni’ and its parallel with the ‘doyiker’ idea in contemporary Jewry is simply too good to ignore in connexion with the careful position that Holy Father Alexis had to stake out in his public priestly mission, which was all the more tenuous for his and his parishes’ chronic poverty.

In the meantime, being a fragmented and recently-Minneapolitan Orthodox Christian convert of Czech extraction and walking a path that intersects this folkway at a number of different points, I will simply ask: Holy Father Alexis, pray to God for me, a sinner.

Venerable Moses Ugrin of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra

Venerable Moses of Kiev

Saint Moses of Kiev, whom we commemorate today, is one of three brothers, who all hailed from the Carpathian Mountains, who all served in the retinue of Saint Boris the Martyr-Prince of Rostov, and who all met salvific ends in Christ – but who did so along very divergent paths.

Saint Yuri of Al’ta, the youngest brother, was slain and beheaded alongside Saint Boris when the latter yielded himself without struggle into the murderous hands of his brother Svyatopolk. Venerable Efrem of Novotorzhsk was not with Saint Boris at the time, but later found Saint Yuri’s remains and buried his body before retiring from the world, leaving instructions to his fellow-monks to bury his brother’s head alongside him. The third brother, Saint Moses, had a rather more eventful life. Moses escaped the clutches of Svyatopolk and fled to Kiev where he sought refuge with the sister of Yaroslav the Wise. However, when the city was captured by the Polish King Bolesław, he was taken prisoner-of-war and made a slave.

A Polish noblewoman, seeing Moses’ tall and handsome shape and conceiving a deep lust for him, bought him, unwilling, from Bolesław and sought to make him her bed-thrall. She tempted him with her body; however, Moses refused her advances. She plied him with all sorts of delicious food, but he would not eat it. She then took him in an open carriage and showed him all of the wealthy lands of which she was mistress; however, Moses was bent upon becoming a monk, and told her that the perishable wealth of the world could not tempt him.

A mendicant monk who happened to be passing through tonsured Moses. When his Polish owner found out about it, she became furious and ordered Moses to be flung onto the ground and beaten with heavy iron rods until the ground was soaking with his blood. Then, she sought Bolesław’s permission to do with him as she pleased, and he gave her this right. She then forced him into bed with her and tried, unsuccessfully, to rape him. Frustrated and humiliated, the Polish noblewoman ordered him to be beaten every day 100 times with the lash until he bled to death.

On account of this defiance, Bolesław planned to undertake a great persecution of monks in the Polish lands, but his death prevented this order from being carried out. The Polish noblewoman was killed in a peasant uprising shortly thereafter. As for Moses himself, he escaped once again – but he had been so badly wounded and crippled from the tortures he had undergone that he had to lean on a staff whenever he walked. He made his way to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra where he took the cowl.

Saint Moses lived for ten years at the Lavra under the tutelage of Holy Father Antoniy, and was a firm support to his fellow monks there. One brother approached him, confessing that he had lustful thoughts. Moses sought the brother’s obedience, and forbade him to speak to any woman as long as he lived. Then he struck the brother on the chest with his staff, and at once the brother was relieved of his temptations. The Venerable Moses reposed in the Lord in 1043.

Venerable Moses of Kiev, for the deliverance of all slaves from their captivity, for the deliverance of us all from the passions and for the salvation of our souls, pray to Christ our God for us sinners!

Back to the good earth

Rural Anhui province

The 1931 novel The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck has a well-deserved place on my list of books that changed my life – because it, along with the Judge Dee murder mysteries by Robert van Gulik, stoked in me an abiding interest in the history and lifeways of old China. Having recently looked into the works of Jimmy Yen 晏陽初, Liang Shuming 梁漱溟, Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 and Richard Tawney, then having understood that Pearl Buck herself was not only a contemporary but a friend and fellow-traveller of this literary-political-activist circle that would become the China Democratic League, I felt it high time I went back and read this touchstone of my high-school years.

It’s funny: perspective changes radically with age and distance. Different aspects of the story came to the surface, reading through The Good Earth this time, than when I was, well, half my current age. The story itself was familiar. Poor, hard-working Wang Lung, living alone with his fussy and aged father, takes a wife from the Great House of Hwang – a plain, seemingly dull-witted but intensely loyal and surprisingly-profound serving-girl named O-lan. Together Wang Lung and O-lan make a life for themselves: planting and harvesting, having children, being forced to move by famine, being forced to move again by revolution. Wang Lung experiences both the bitterest deprivations – losing his home and having to live on his hands and on whatever O-lan and his children can beg – and later the temptations and vices of wealth, as his fortunes improve and he comes into possession of more and more of the land of the House of Hwang.

Certain things I noticed in the story that I didn’t before – the geographical features and the importance of, not only earth, but water as an elemental force in the lives of Chinese peasants – with small surfeits or dearths either way being deadly. The attention paid to the labour-intensive agricultural techniques. A subtle but persistent sexism which is as often expressed in the actions of the women in the story (Old Mistress Hwang, Cuckoo, Lotus, even occasionally O-lan herself) as those of the men. There is a great wealth of knowledge of Chinese folkways at the grassroots which breaks forth from the pages, which is clearly the fruit of close observation. The selective folk-piety of the peasant, easily discarded or inverted. The fear and distrust of soldiers. The paranoia of the wealthy that their money and goods will be stolen. These are just a handful of examples.

Again, the story, the characters, the struggles and conflicts between them were all deeply familiar to me from my high-school years, and this time experience lay over it, giving my mental pictures some greater depth. In one sense, reading it now gave me a new appreciation for Buck’s authorial talent, being able to inhabit and express the perspectives of people in wildly different walks of life – in a culture not her own. That’s something I admire and value. On the other hand, certain stylistic choices and choices of characterisation she makes – for instance, the character of Cuckoo, who seems to take on three different personæ (lord’s mistress, tea-shop madam, lady-in-waiting) as the story demands it – seem a trifle questionable, and the reasons for her ‘switching hats’ so often seem rather ad hoc. Still, the treatment of Cuckoo – and O-lan, Lotus and Pear Blossom, the women in Wang Lung’s life – is meant to show how, even for a good-natured and generally ‘well-behaved’ husband like Wang Lung, women still ended up getting a raw deal in China’s old society. O-lan, faithful but slow and not particularly pretty, is treated by her husband like a piece of furniture. Wang Lung chases Lotus, a prostitute who becomes his second wife, but when she enters the household she treats Wang Lung’s first wife and daughters with open contempt. (We get intimations that her childhood was also deeply unhappy.) Pear Blossom grows up as a servant in Wang Lung’s household, in deadly fear and loathing of young men in particular – and little wonder, given how she sees how Wang Lung’s sons and nephew treat the womenfolk. On the other hand, Buck’s portrait of Wang Lung’s relationship with his eldest daughter, a ‘poor fool’ with a mental disability, is truly touching: probably this is a reflection of her relationship with her own daughter, who also had a developmental disability.

Again, being a bit more familiar now with Pearl Buck’s literary milieu I searched the book for signs of her politics and religious sensibilities, only to find that – talented an author as she is! – she hides her tracks well. Her characterisation of a communist radical preaching on the street, and Wang Lung’s interested-but-incredulous reaction to him, provides a little bit of intellectual comedy. The radical scoffs at Wang Lung as ‘backwards’, but Wang Lung’s perspective that real wealth comes from the topsoil is presented sympathetically. Wang wonders how it happens that the bourgeoisie can prevent the sun from shining or the rain from falling. And although we are left to infer rather than having it spelt out for us directly, Buck’s sympathies with the peasantry in general, we see perhaps traces of her antipathy to both foreign political concepts and missionary Protestant Christianity in the fact that O-lan makes shoe linings out of their pamphlets, though this is as much to show O-lan’s thrift and practicality during their sojourn in the ‘south’ as anything else.

Speaking of which, Buck does present a certain set of gæographical biases and stereotypes, of the sort which Jimmy Yen did his best to refute and combat. ‘Northerners’ like O-lan (from Shandong) and Wang Lung (from Anhui) are simple, thrifty, hard-working – noble even in their poverty and direct even when begging or stealing. ‘Southerners’ like Cuckoo and Lotus are subtle, crafty, able to work the angles. She presents, I think, several of the ways in which discrimination has historically tended to operate (for example, with ‘southerners’ looking down on ‘smelly’ garlic-eating northerners). It’s actually still a bit unclear to me, whether she presents these stereotypes because she believes them to be accurate, or whether she is attempting (as with her treatment of the various women in her story, and their struggles) to prompt an internal critique of them.

The foregoing might make it sound like I want to pick The Good Earth apart, but really – far from it! This novel is both the sprawling epic of one man’s very full and varied life, and a touchingly-intimate, if somewhat dated, portrait of a ‘China that was’. Buck is very rightly regarded as an author of the first calibre for this book in particular, and it was a joy to go back and revisit this novel, which has dwelt deep so long in my memory and on my bookshelf.

The hiraeth (and exhortations) of the expat

Part 3 of my Here-hood Saints series

Life as an expat can be very difficult, and it shapes you in ways that you would not have imagined beforehand. My wife and I have both lived as expats. There is a kind of ‘weightlessness’ with it, which is spoken of by Mother Maria of Paris, whose memory we celebrate today alongside her fellow new martyrs Saints Il’ya (Fondaminsky), Dimitri (Klepinin) and Yuri (Skobtsov). The expat is cut loose from the bonds that tether him: the exhortations of his elders, the expectations of his peers. The new society which surrounds him has not lain hold of him yet. Mother Maria perceived this perfectly when she said that losing one’s homeland is something akin to losing one’s body – though in her case, the trauma was doubled by the fact that her expat displacement was political and involuntary.

When you’re an expat, after that initial glow of the ‘honeymoon stage’ of living in a wondrous new place wears off, you begin to draw close to ‘your own’. You seek out people who are like you, who speak the same language, who share the same outlook. In both cities I lived in, Baotou and Luoyang, my closest friends were young Englishmen with an interest in video games: we bonded over Europa Universalis 3 and Super Smash Bros. If you’re not careful, the weightlessness becomes that of a fragile but impermeable soap-bubble, and you can develop all manner of bad habits and vices. But if you keep your experience permeable, there is also an opportunity for a ‘double witness’ in the expat life. (I’m afraid I’ve only become semi-good at one of the directions of that witness – and vices, I developed too many.)

Another saint with an icon at Saint Herman’s which, like Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco’s, I had often venerated without knowing precisely why I do it, is that of Patriarch Saint Tikhon of Moscow. Like with Saint John, I’ve been mesmerised by his face. Examine the icon of Saint Tikhon. His white brows and intense eyes, although they have a fierce, almost burning kindness, nonetheless express themselves with a certain kind of sadness, a look of what the elder Britons would call hiraeth. It’s a look I’ve seen often in the faces of expats. Before I read his letters, before I knew his story, I venerated him simply because it seemed he knew what it was to be weightless.

Of course, knowing his story as I do now, it seems somewhat that that hiraeth would have been for the loss of the Russia he knew to the ideological war zone that took its place after 1917, and not perhaps so much that from his time in the Americas. He became, not merely an expat, but an exile within his own nation. But it doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to think on what it would have been to him, to serve as the archpastor among a people so alien to him as we Americans are. The Orthodox of the Americas were, even in his day, a motley crew, a mishmash of poor immigrants from around the globe. (It seems I can’t help myself, making these hard rock and heavy metal references with regard to the history of our church. Of course Tommy Lee is a Greek; but that’s an excuse, not an explanation.)

Bishop Tikhon – suddenly servant not only to Russian-Americans but also to Rusins, South Slavs, Syrians, Inuits and Aleuts – could very well have retreated to his bubble, and kept to his bishop’s office in Alaska or New York. But he didn’t. The weightlessness of being an expat led him instead to a new intensity of witness, and he spent much of his American sojourn in travel. In his correspondence, we can see how he responded to the sufferings of the Aleuts to famine and sickness: he issued ringing clarion calls to their aid and denounced the attitudes of racial superiority that kept them in poverty. Seeing Rusin, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bulgarian mine workers beleaguered and striking to fill their bellies, he gave from his own money to support them, and told his flock to do the same. He financially and spiritually supported Father Alexis (Tovt) in his mission to his fellow Rusins. Seeing Syrians in need, he blessed the Church of Saint Nicholas in Brooklyn for them.

Bishop Tikhon bore his witness by keeping his attention on where he was. Even as an expat, even untethered from his Russian home country, even constantly in travel, even beset – we may easily imagine – by that intense sadness and longing for home, Bishop Tikhon was here, with the Orthodox who had come to the New World from many other shores. Even thus ‘weightless’, he could still give of his own substance for his flock who needed him, and he did so. There was a kind of doyikayt, a ‘here-hood’ even in his life abroad.

My wife’s politics are a good deal more conservative, in the conventional American sense, than mine are. There are a set of typical attitudes that prevail among immigrants in the United States, and she seems to have imbibed many of these, such as: success is the result of effort and intelligence; and those who gain by success have a right to keep it. She has a deep antipathy to affirmative action, which she sees – with some justification, it appears – as a form of discrimination against Asians. She also has next to no patience for the internal ‘identity politics’ of Asian-Americans. Her conviction is that Asian-American groups – including not just Chinese-Americans but also Japanese-, Korean-, Hmong-, Lao- and Vietnamese-Americans – need to work together and put aside their differences rather than keeping to their own separate ethnic enclaves.

But even in the ‘weightlessness’ of life as an expat, she hasn’t lost a deep sense of compassion and solidarity. I’ve seen it repeatedly, and it’s one of the things I fell in love with about her. She made personal connexions with her fellow foreign students in Pittsburgh and was more than willing to help them with either school-related or life problems when they arose. Most recently, upon hearing the news about family separations at the border, she told me bluntly: caring for these people is America’s responsibility. It should be part of our character. There’s more than a little bit of Saint Tikhon’s expat sensibility in my wife’s thinking and manner of expression, and I continue to be endeared to it.

Now, of course, I venerate Saint Tikhon at church not merely for that face – compassionate, fierce, joyful and sad all at once, the face of an expat. There was a great deal of dynamism in that holiness, as I learned from his writings – some of which were even addressed to us Minnesotans, the spiritual children of Holy Father Alexis, and all of which we can still learn from. Saintly Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow, continue to pray to God for me, a sinner.