Flavours of Youth

There’s a certain style of Orthodox iconography. It’s called a triptychon. They are three icons mounted together on hinges at the sides, that open in the middle. The holy images included in a triptychon are typically part of the same spiritual theme, or contribute to a larger whole: for example, a Christ Enthroned icon seated between the Mother of God and Saint John the Forerunner; or icons sequentially narrating the progression of the Crucifixion or the Resurrection. However, all the figures and all the moments are present simultaneously to the prayer before the icon. Past and futurity are eliminated. Time collapses within a diptychon or a triptychon just as sæcular time collapses within the liturgy. Moments in a diptychon, a triptychon or any other kind of sequential icon are not meant to be taken as repeated or consumed, but rather reiterated and renewed through liturgical participation or prayer.

The Chinese-Japanese animated film Flavours of Youth (《肆式青春》) came out last month, and got put on Netflix. A collaborative effort between directors Yi Xiaoxing 易小星, Takeuchi Yoshitaka 竹內良貴 and Li Haoling 李豪凌 and produced by CoMix Wave Films, Flavours of Youth consists of three animated shorts (one from each director) that fit together a bit like a triptych. Even though Chinese animation, like Chinese film generally, is traditionally structured in an operatic format, here really only one of the shorts comes anywhere close to having that operatic feel. But all three have very similar themes – like trying to grasp at fragments of meaning and reality in a hyper-real modernisation where time speeds up and leaves all merely-human things in the dust. Reassembling the human element is done here through a kind of iconography. Moments are reiterated. Time is collapsed. Sense begins to filter through only when futurity and past are liminally overridden. In the beginning of the first short, all of the main characters are sitting together in a Beijing airport waiting on a flight to Guangzhou. WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW BELOW. Skip the next three paragraphs to avoid them.

The first of these shorts, ‘Memories in a Bowl of Mifen’ (一碗鄉愁) doesn’t have much of a plot. It’s impressionistic. The narrator and main character Xiaoming 小明 begins in Beijing, reflecting on his childhood in Hunan Province – how he used to eat bowls of rice noodles or sanxian mifen 三鮮米粉 together with his grandmother. He reflects on the taste of the noodles, how the traditionally-prepared noodles were rich in flavour, the vegetables were fresh and liberally-spread over the bowl, and the soup had a full and satisfying body. His grandmother bought the noodles from a store with no name and no sign, run by an old local couple who ran the shop for 20 years before having to move out. Later he went to another store which served the same kind of noodles, but only so he could watch the girl he liked ride by on her bike on the way to school. There isn’t much by way of story or characterisation here, but the local details are lovingly dwelt-on and touchingly portrayed: the ingredients in the noodles, the terraced landscapes and bamboo garden fences, the zip-up nylon school uniforms, the open storefront, everything right down to the decorations on the bowls. These are juxtaposed with images from Beijing: solid slab concrete, jianbing stands and crowded subway stations. The store which serves sanxian mifen in Beijing is jarring in its unlikeness to the local mom-and-pop mifen shops in Hunan: machine-cooked noodles, big metal pots of soup, glass windows, a fast-food counter, plastic bowls and chopsticks. (Xiaoming remarks that they’re stingy with the vegetables, and he doesn’t enjoy eating rice noodles as much anymore.) Only news that his grandmother is dying recalls Xiaoming to Hunan, and after she passes on he tries to find the old sanxian mifen shop where he used to watch his senpai ride by on her bike, and the short ends with him smiling as another pair of schoolgirls ride by on bikes.

The second short, ‘A Little Fashion Show’ or ‘Neon Lights’ (霓裳浮光) has none of the impressionistic, local flavour of the first short, but what it lacks there, it makes up with a bit of psychologically-profound characterisation. It focusses instead on a well-established Guangzhou fashion diva, Yilin 依琳, who is considered to be getting a little too old by her industry, and her younger college-student sister Lulu 璐璐, who makes clothes by hand. Yilin takes Lulu into her home and supports her with her work, and Lulu is happy to look after the house and her studies in spite of her older sister’s overworking herself and neglecting her. However, Yilin’s preoccupation with scoring modelling gigs and keeping up her youthful looks (particularly when a smug young rival fresh out of high school comes along), both causes her health to deteriorate and her relationship with Lulu to suffer. We learn that Lulu chafes more than a bit under Yilin’s condescension, and that she isn’t learning to sew clothes only to make money – she really wants to be a good sister to Yilin. The ending kind of fell a bit flat for me, in that Yilin doesn’t end up having to choose between her sister and her job, and she’s kind of talked out of her problems by her manager. In the end, Yilin and Lulu come to have a professional partnership as well as a closer relationship as sisters.

But the third short is where the collection as a whole really started to shine. Somehow the iconographic conceit of the entire collection was seized upon with gusto by Li Haoling, and he put together the tear-jerker ‘Shanghai Love’ or ‘Sun After a Light Shower’ (纖雨初晴) that collapses time as it narrates, with operatic flourish, the disjointed life of real-estate developer Li Mo 李墨 and his first crush Xia Xiaoyu 夏小雨. Discovering an old cassette tape from when he and Xiaoyu were in middle school together that he didn’t remember ever playing, Mo rushes back to his grandparents’ house in a condemned old part of town so he can find a tape deck to play it in. Along the way there, he begins to remember the messages that he and Xiaoyu used to pass to each other on tape. The cassette – and the walk back toward his grandparents’ house – begin to take on additional significance as his memories of Xiaoyu return. The two of them had a fight over which high school they would try to go to. Mo stopped slacking off and started studying harder to get into Xiaoyu’s school, while Xiaoyu failed her gaokao 高考 exam (enraging her abusive father). The two of them no longer talk together (symbolically represented by Mo’s CD Walkman). Mo begins to regret that fight and everything that followed from it – as he ventures back into the neighbourhood that his firm wants to tear down, there is something of a progress of the prodigal son. The sequences run together, memory and present blur seamlessly. Mo borrows the tape player from his grandmother and learns that Xiaoyu deliberately failed her exam just to be together in the same school with him, in spite of her father. It is a poignant religious moment in a Kierkegaardian or Dostoevskian sense for Mo: a moment of repentance that spans the entirety of their relationship. The screen forms a diptychon as the teenage Xiaoyu talks into the tape recorder to a weeping adult Mo about her love for him, about the hopes and dreams she had for their life together.

There is something deeply Grantian about this collection, in that it voices certain ‘intimations of deprival’. It’s not a Jia Zhangke film by any stretch of the imagination, but the intimations are there. The hyper-real modern forces, forces of capital – symbolised by the Beijing noodle shop (or really Beijing tout court, which functions like Saint Petersburg in a Dostoevsky novel), by the Guangzhou modelling agencies that refuse Yilin on account of her age, by the real-estate firms that tear down old Shanghai neighbourhoods, even by small and ordinary things like the CD Walkman that prevents Li Mo from listening to Xiaoyu or the cellphone that Yilin ignores – are continually pressing in, and they appear to be winning in time. But there are these glimmers of hope – small moments of human connexion that rebel against the tyranny of time and the ontology of age and death.

It’s slightly unfortunate – I say slightly here because I am indeed a fan of the animation style – that the directors and the producers chose to use a hyper-modern Japanese artistic vernacular to illustrate three very modern Chinese stories. It is far too much to ask that there be a return to Havoc in Heaven-style visual conventions, which probably wouldn’t fit these stories anyway, and of course as a joint venture there is a marketing angle to consider. Netflix branded the collection as ‘From the Creators of Your Name’ – a Japanese animated film I will now have to check out. But the exquisiteness of the local details – in some places rivalling films like Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away or From Up on Poppy Hill – seem to mark a point on the revitalisation of conventional animation currently in progress on the Chinese mainland. Flavours of Youth is definitely worth your time to go see.

The Moscow Patriarchate and pension reform

His Holiness Patriarch Kirill and Protopriest Fr Vsevolod (Chaplin)

The political brinksmanship that keeps coming out of Istanbul of late seems to be gathering pace, and the takes in the Anglo-European media have been insufferably predictable. (My own take, from within the OCA, can be found here, for those interested.) Suffice it to say that Western observers consider the Moscow Patriarchate to be firmly under the thumb of the Russian government, if not willing stooges of Putin’s every whim.

As with many things, there is a grain of truth to this observation. Orthodoxy has never been quite as squeamish as Western forms of Christianity about cultivating a close relationship with the state, and that has often meant historically that the Church adopts a syntax and usage that are amenable to certain core state interests. But the actual concerns of the Moscow Patriarchate in recent days seem to put the lie to this ‘conventional wisdom’, if you look closely enough.

The big issue at hand for the Russian Church is not the tomos (though they’re concerned about that, too) but rather the deeply-unpopular pension reform raising the retirement age five years for both sexes. Now, in most Anglophone coverage of the pension reform, where the Church is mentioned at all, it is usually to highlight its silence and complicity in the reform – because that fits the ‘narrative’ that it serves primarily as Putin’s handmaiden. But the Church – and here I mean not just Patriarch Kirill and the representatives of his office, but the other hierarchs and the rank-and-file clergy – have been anything but silent on the topic!

That’s not to say they’ve had a united voice. (Actually, so far the only official thing that has been said by the Danilov is that the Church doesn’t really have a single united stance on the issue, which is prima facie true, but still a tad disappointing.) But there are three broad camps emerging within Church circles on the topic. The first is a quasi-Stoic, austerian stance that says that these pension reforms are painful but necessary, and ordinary people need to grit their teeth and tighten their belts for the sake of the greater good. (On the extreme end of this camp are those churchmen who say the reforms are a divine punishment upon the Russian people for their godlessness.) The second group takes a harder neutral stance than the Danilov itself has, and says that the question of pension reforms is outside the Church’s competence to address. The last group – the group to which I am certainly most sympathetic – says that the pension reforms are unjust because they are unfilial: that the people who have contributed the most to the welfare of Russian society in their lives, are now being punished for the mistakes of the young. (One is tempted to consider this logic somewhat Confucian; but the proper analogy to my mind is the Apology of Socrates.) This radical left-Platonist / -Confucian approach is being championed most vocally by none other than Protopriest Father Vsevolod (Chaplin)!

Now, Western media gloss Fr Vsevolod as an ‘arch-conservative’; when it comes to sexual ethics and cultural issues, they’re not entirely wrong to do so. But I’ve blogged before about Fr Vsevolod (Chaplin)’s – perhaps surprising to some – agreement with the Œcumenical Patriarchate, and low-key disagreement with the Russian government, on œcological ethics, to the point where I remarked that he came off sounding like Bill McKibben or Wendell Barry. (‘I love this guy’, I believe I said.) Not just on the environment, either: Fr Vsevolod has been outspoken on œconomic issues as well. He has called for progressive income taxation (a rebuke of Putin’s flat tax policies); has called for a populist alternative, anti-usury banking system; has castigated Russia’s oligarchs as ‘pathetic jerks’ and called for the confiscation of their wealth; and has praised the theory of protectionist, state-directed investment promoted by left-wing Russian œconomist Sergei Glaz’ev. This recent œconomic populism on Fr Vsevolod’s part is not at all out of character for him.

His Holiness Patriarch Kirill’s well-publicised differences with Fr Vsevolod are certainly real, but they have likewise been somewhat overstated. On the environment, banking, income inequality and even pensions, Patriarch Kirill has also in the past shown a fairly strong left-populist streak. However, they do differ in terms of tactics. Patriarch Kirill does tend to be more accommodating with regard to the state, to a point; Fr Vsevolod advocates a more direct and prophetic approach.

The Danilov may be slow, and it may be accounting for a disunited clergy on this pressing issue. But it is far from being the politically-neutered, abject state bureau it is often painted in the Western media and among its domestic rivals. There was a time when it actually was beholden to the state – namely, during the synodal period and then again under the Soviets after an all-too-brief reinstatement of the Patriarchate. But these historical circumstances – owing to the particulars of rule by Peter the Great, by Lenin and by Stalin – no longer obtain, to the point where a difference in degree of government control becomes difference in kind. Pretending that these conditions still obtain is bad history. More to the point, pretending that they do is actually a form of theological orientalism, as I have stated before, and it plays into dangerous sæcular orientalist fantasies about Russia.

On the present issue, however, I hope it’s not too far out of line to hope that Patriarch Kirill listens to Fr Vsevolod’s group, and urges the Kremlin in a stronger and more strident tone to keep pedalling back – or, better yet, scrap – these ill-considered ‘reforms’.

Realism and the pelvic issues, part 9: A good day for a Funeral Oration

One of the Platonic dialogues I really ought to have referred back to more frequently (as I have here and here) over the past year, is the Funeral Oration. It is a particularly fitting dialogue for our day and age; being a satirical imprecation of the selective memory and distortion of reality inherent to patriotic political rhetoric, of which we have seen a particularly egregious example in recent days, in the form – fittingly enough – of a funeral. Particularly in connexion with the Phædrus (where through the orations of Lysias and Socrates we are treated to the ironic connexions, both false and true, between rhetoric and erōs), the Funeral Oration provides us with a singularly apposite mirror for our the state of our collective souls.

The connexions between the Funeral Oration and the erotic urge are hard to miss; Plato practically bludgeons us over the head with them. For one thing, Menexenus here makes his second appearance as a major character of the Dialogues after the Lysis, a dialogue which is entirely about love. Though the love spoken of there is the harmonious and friendly philos rather than the febrile madness of erōs, we should not ignore the setting of the Lysis: Socrates is speaking in the palæstra to a bevy of ‘beautiful youths’ showing off the good form and skill of their bodies, and there is a definite homoerotic tinge to the questions of ‘like’ and ‘unlike’ in a discussion about male friendship. Particularly important is that Menexenus leaves the scene ahead of the critical questions about love to take part in a sacrifice (cf. Cephalus at the beginning of the Republic!!); and returns at the close of the discussion, after the question of friendship has been explored to its aporetic conclusion.

Secondly, Plato has Socrates give credit for his satire on Athenian patriotism to a courtezan, Aspasia the lover of Pericles, who never appears in the dialogue herself; and the analogical idea buried within this attribution is that this kind of ‘patriotic’ rhetoric is to truth what prostitution is to love. (Note also the misogynist barb Menexenus throws at Socrates about Aspasia at the end; Socrates’ irony is completely lost on him.) One is tempted to draw parallels to the Phædrus here, about the relationship between rhetoric and erōs: Lysias presents himself to Phædrus – in the form of a written speech! – as a ‘non-lover’ who is to be preferred to the lover, and uses various techniques of sophistry to prove his point. Socrates, on the other hand, first tries to outdo Lysias at his own game in decrying the disadvantages of love with various disingenuous arguments (throwing his cloak over his head in the process), before repenting of his blasphemy against erōs and sincerely embarking on a higher discourse on the nature of the soul – and finally redirecting the conversation with Phædrus into the nature of oratory (!!) and its relationship to writing.

Like the never personally-appearing Lysias in the Phædrus and the elusive Cephalus in the Republic, Menexenus absents himself from the key point of the dialogue about love in the Lysis. Thus, the Funeral Oration isn’t really that much of a dialogue, properly speaking. Not having been ‘initiated’ into the questions of friendship, Menexenus is not capable of engaging Socrates on behalf of anything higher than rhetoric after the style of Lysias; thus, the rather perfunctory conversation between Socrates and Menexenus really only serves the purpose of bookending this satire of oratory.

Likewise, our public-intellectual caste, also being ‘ever strangers’ to philosophy, therefore engages only in the search for a rhetoric that gives the appearance of truth. The funeral orations of this past week confirm, more than anything else, that we are committed not to the remembered truths of what has happened in our country since Vietnam, but rather to a fictionalised reminder of Vietnam, and everything since, parallel to that the Athenians told themselves about their rôle in the Persian Wars, which Plato lampoons in this Dialogue. Plato rightly detests just such manipulative uses of political rhetoric – calling it a form of ‘flattery’, as in the Gorgias. The Theuth of our day, by the way, is no longer a scribbler on scrolls; he sits in the director’s chair, choreographs the firefights, makes up the set, guides the cameras, orchestrates the soundtrack to be suitably maudlin. And just as Athenians were capable of praising themselves to the skies for their own virtue even as they were subjugating their neighbours, descending into tyranny and letting civil blood in successive civil wars, somehow we Americans are still capable of pretending that a war of imperial subjugation waged on false pretenses in what had been French Indochina, had anything remotely to do with the defence of liberty here or abroad.

This pretense cannot be addressed with any appeal to rationality or facts. Facts no longer matter (if indeed they ever have), even to the people who loudly mourn the passing of their relevance. No: the delusion that there was anything the least bit ‘honourable’ or ‘decent’ about dropping seven million tonnes of explosives on Southeast Asian farmers, or about any of the conflicts we’ve started since, must instead be explained by a certain erotic drive coupled with a form of psychological repression. It is not an accident that, in the Dialogues and particularly in the Phædrus, rhetoric is so closely wrapped up with erotic desire.

It is surprisingly difficult to think of the American casus belli in Vietnam, or of American self-justification in the Cold War more generally, without referring parenthetically to Dr Strangelove and the sexual paranoias of Brigadier-General Jack D Ripper. As John Grant puts it: ‘We all know how Truman, Eisenhower and the rest had to keep the commie yellow peril in check lest—what?—they invade California? Fluoridate our water? Destroy our vital bodily fluids?’ There is indeed more than a hint of sexual insecurity underscoring the urge to ‘do something’ on the world stage to prove the potency of our… uh… ideals, that simply didn’t go away in 1970, or with the fall of the Berlin Wall. If anything, the triumph of the sexual revolutionaries of the Vietnam Era seems only to have accelerated our penchant for war and ‘humanitarian intervention’ abroad – the confluence of the Second Balkan War and the Lewinsky scandal under the first boomer administration attests this almost perfectly, reprised in a rather pathetic way most recently with all the due honour and decency of leers at Ariana Grande’s behind. Looks like poor old Allan Bloom really did have the last laugh.

Plato himself doesn’t really offer us a way out of this cul de sac, at least not in the Funeral Oration itself. Menexenus and Socrates part ways, seemingly without Menexenus being made any the wiser – Socrates offers only to continue his tutelage in rhetoric. For erōs to be teachable, it must be directed in some degree outward, toward truth. For the orator in love with himself, desiring either a status of prominence and glory for himself, or for a collective self-definition that does only selective honour to the truth, Socratic philosophy can only do so much to ‘seduce’ him away from Lysias, the Sophists and ‘naked’ rhetoric. And so the funeral oration itself, though it should be a ‘teachable’ moment for a public desiring truth and meaning, in fact becomes only a moment of self-indulgent vanity for the same public, and a moment pregnant with tragicomic ironies for the philosopher.

Rasselas as anti-orientalist fiction

So, having been on a kick of re-reading books I found meaningful and moving back in high school, I decided to give another look to The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson, which I read when I was still deep in the throes of my Jennifer complex. My gentle readers, it may amuse you and give you a hint of how muddled my still-all-too-deeply-Anglican mind is, that it never once occurred to me to connect the St Anthony’s Monastery of Johnson’s novel with the sketes of Ægypt visited by William Dalrymple in From the Holy Mountain, or with the Desert Fathers whose wisdom was compiled in the Apophthegmata, until it dawned on me of a sudden on this read-through. Yet another unlooked-for connexion between the old Platonic England I admire, and Eastern Christendom in the broad strokes! Against all of my better inclinations, I do seem to be piecing together a kind of Anglo-Orthodox Byzantine mosaic from the fragments of my previous intellectual formation.

The tale of Johnson’s Rasselas is a deceptively-simple one. The eponymous East African prince, who is lodged in a ‘happy valley’, hedged about with mountains and forests and ‘supplied… with the necessities of life, and all delights and superfluities’ by the emperor’s annual visits, in which ‘every desire was granted’ without need for pain or toil. Rasselas languishes here in boredom, needing ‘something to persue’, and is overcome with a desire to escape. In his efforts to find an exit from the happy valley, he meets Imlac, a very-learned and -experienced merchant’s son who becomes the voice of reason and wisdom in Rasselas’s life (and who appears to be something of a proxy for the author). Imlac helps Rasselas find a narrow spot in the mountain where they can begin making a tunnel out, but they are discovered in their escape by Rasselas’s sister Nekayah, who asks Rasselas and Imlac to take her with them. Rasselas agrees, and Nekayah brings her favourite maid Pekuah and several other maidservants.

The remainder of the story progresses through Cairo and the deserts of Ægypt, as Rasselas and Nekayah attempt to discover a ‘choice of life’ outside the happy valley that is nevertheless fulfilling and happy. Johnson reveals through their adventures the fact that even the people who seem the happiest often struggle with a myriad of different worries, setbacks, hardships and doubts – many of them of their own infliction. Through several such vignettes, he lampoons the idea that virtue or knowledge pursued for their own sake are sufficient for happiness. The climax of the story happens when Pekuah is kidnapped and held for ransom by bandits as Rasselas and Nekayah explore one of the pyramids at Giza.

Setting Rasselas in ‘exotic’ locations like East Africa and Ægypt instead of London and Paris was in part owing to certain interests of Johnson himself – who had been intrigued and enamoured of Africa since reading of the travels of Fr Jerónimo Lobo, SJ – and in part owing to a purpose on his part of de-mystifying Africa. Rasselas, his sister and companions, and the people he meets are very much not exotic to English readers, and this is deliberate. Johnson makes them complete characters with desires and preoccupations very much meant to be universal: they want to be happy, fulfilled – and they want to have purpose and meaning. Johnson was indeed one of the few Englishmen of his time to treat black Africans as complete people, and opposed slavery and colonialism in vehement terms.

Johnson’s novel is often criticised for being simplistic or flat in terms of its plot, but this seems to be deliberate. On one hand, he is trying to make a broader philosophical point against flights of fancy and in favour of a more ‘realistic’ view of life, in line with The Vanity of Human Wishes. Johnson, like the Russians who studied China, is working at cross-purposes with his Jesuit tutors. The ‘happy valley’ itself is a deflation of the idea of Shangri-La, an exploration of the misery of a state in which nothing is to be striven for. But he also excites expectations of adventure and romance through his choices of œuvre and setting – and no doubt this played a rôle in the marketing of the book, which Johnson wrote to defray the expenses of his mother’s funeral – but inevitably deflates them too, often with a satirical edge. There is little found in Johnson’s Cairo that could not be found in any other city. The plight of the poor and the insecurities of the rich are immediately understandable. The pyramid is not home to spectres or curses. Likewise Johnson makes no attempt to romanticise the nomadic life of the Arabs, but neither does he make them out to be backward, duplicitous or sensuous after the Orientalist tropes of his time. Pekuah comes by nothing worse at her Arab captors’ hands than boredom.

On the other hand, he is trying to make a point which can be considered broadly anti-colonialist. Johnson refuses point-blank the idea that Europeans are in any immediate sense superior to non-Europeans, and that only the ‘unsearchable will of the Supreme Being’ has placed Europeans in a position of relative power and technological prowess. Johnson has a religious, Anglican universalism about fallen human nature, which opposes a sæcular universalism which in practice provides cover for the murder, fraud, robbery and enslavement of aboriginal peoples under European colonial rule, under a banner of ‘progress’. Though Rasselas is not nearly as vehement against European colonialism as some of Johnson’s other works, he nonetheless says, through Imlac:

The Europeans are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Rasselas sparks immediate comparisons with Candide wherever it is mentioned, but of course Johnson has nothing close to Arouet’s hatred of religion. St Anthony’s Monastery is chosen as the setting of much of the late part of the novel, and by the end of the book, Pekuah, ‘never so much charmed with any place’ as St Anthony’s, determines to choose the life of a nun, and ‘wished only to fill it with pious maidens’ (a curiously hagiographic phrase). At the same time, even the monastic life is not romanticised by the worldly Johnson; one of his characters is a desert hermit who grows weary and despondent in his life in the desert, and eagerly returns to Cairo after Rasselas’s visit.

Rasselas easily earns its keep on my shelf, along with the rest of that small portion of Johnson’s opus which I’ve managed to collect over these years. With regard to these old and well-loved books, perhaps it’s worth letting them sit aside for a time, but not failing to go back and re-read them. Speaking for myself, finding new insights and discovering new connexions even within an old and familiar work on successive read-throughs is very much worth the time taken. In my own case, having become more familiar both with Eastern Orthodox spirituality and with post-colonial theory, lends a decidedly different (but by no means less-flattering) cast to Rasselas this time through.

‘I was in prison, and…’

‘…you herded me like overcrowded chattel.’

Prison conditions in Minnesota are bad and getting worse. We may have a relatively low prison population, but we are also one of the few states in the US where imprisoned population is increasing. Our state, which is 83% white, has a prison population which is 51% non-white. We have a situation where prisoners are being shunted into the county system, and where our state legislators are unwilling to increase spending to maintain this population in dignified conditions. The reason? We have insane sentencing laws and 40% of our state’s inmates are there on technical violations of parole, a non-violent offence which should not be punished by more prison time. As far as policy goes, reincarceration of prisoners on technical parole violations needs to end.

‘…you denied me medicine.’

Two hundred eighty prisoners have died in Minnesota prisons between 2000 and 2013 – and substandard medical care to prisoners with health conditions (as well as deliberate neglect) has undoubtedly contributed to this number.

‘…you stripped me naked, bound me and denied me food and water and the company of my loved ones.’

Minnesota prisoners are being collectively punished for the recent murder of Joseph Gomm by a Stillwater prison inmate. They were escorted with dogs and automatic rifles to the gym, where they were shackled together, stripped naked and told to sit in the middle of the gym during a shakedown. The present lockdown means that they are being denied showers and warm food, and their friends and family on the outside were forbidden from talking to them until the 11^th of this month, and even now only by phone under surveillance. Even before the lockdown, Minnesota inmates were routinely denied access to post and packages from the outside.

‘…you made me work for two dollars a day.’

In Minnesota, imprisoned labourers under the Department of Corrections and the for-profit entity Minncor Industries are made to work for 25 cents an hour. As reported by Matt Gretz of the Prison Mirror, this represents pay that has been slashed from $1.50 per hour. At the same time, the goods for sale in the prison canteen have steadily increased in price. These inhumane and exploitative conditions and practices have steadily been getting worse, and the executives of Minncor Industries make six-figure salaries off of these slavery-like conditions under which they use prison labour.

Over the past forty years, it seems like we have forgotten that the dignified treatment of prisoners is not just a bleeding-heart hobby-horse. It is a Gospel imperative enjoined upon us by Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, on the pain of æternal perdition. And let’s not pretend that one political party or ideology is any better than the other on this issue. The present deplorable state of Minnesota prisons is the result of decades of legalistic ‘tough-on-crime’ policy enforced and supported by both major parties, and more generally the result of the logic of capitalism. The Incarcerated Workers’ Organising Committee is doing excellent work bringing attention to the plight of prison populations across the country during the prison strike now ongoing. This cause is one worthy of support in various ways.

The Minnesota Prison Doula Project both advocates for humane prison conditions and for incarcerated women dealing with pregnancy and other health issues. Pages to Prisoners aims to get books to inmates across the Midwestern states for the purposes of self-education, similar to what Books through Bars does in the Mid-Atlantic states. And of course the Incarcerated Workers’ Organising Committee and other advocacy and organising groups can always use support and volunteer work. I strongly encourage my readers to do their part in fulfilling the Gospel commission.

The Russian clerical rôle in demystifying China

Archimandrites Hyacinth (Bichurin, l) and Peter (Kamensky, r)

My hat is off, deeply, to Fr Dionysius (Pozdnyaev), the rector of the Russian Orthodox mission in Hong Kong, for having spearheaded the translation project of a book on Archimandrite Peter (Kamensky), The First Russian Sinologist. The book comes as part of a Chinese-Russian-English translation project on Orthodox missionaries in China, and though brief, it is deeply valuable both from a historical and from a philosophical-theological perspective. It is written in the style of a Russian hagiography, but it presents an important side of the history of European Chinese scholarship of which is not commonly-known. Personally, I found it deeply fascinating and indeed surprising, as it resonated with my experience of both being an expat in China and being tugged inexorably in the direction of the Orthodox faith. It also addresses several intellectual directions and questions I’d been clumsily groping toward on this blog. The Sinological work of Archimandrite Peter is of a great pivotal importance not only for Russian understanding of China, but also for the rest of the West’s understanding. Though his primary mission and concern was religious rather than scholarly, he can nonetheless justifiably be considered a kind of proto-Sa‘îd, a man who was devoted to understanding and explaining China on its own terms, and along the way deflating various Western European orientalist constructs and fantasies about China, which had been en vogue throughout the 18^th century.

The Russian Missions in Beijing were primarily focussed on the descendants of the Albazinian Cossacks, who had been captured by the Kangxi Emperor in 1685 and later resettled in Beijing. This volume from the Orthodox Church in Hong Kong is particularly valuable also for its treatment of the Albazinians, of whose history I was aware only in the broad strokes, though I did at one point help the Holy Dormition Church in Beijing with the translation of some historical materials related to them. The Cossacks who were defeated and surrendered at Albazin to a superior Qing force were not only spared by the order of Kangxi, but in fact welcomed by him and respected for their brave resistance; the Kangxi Emperor apparently took pains to woo them to his service. Those who took his offer – which was most of them – were enrolled in the Bordered Yellow Banner and accorded the rights and honours of Manchu bannermen. They were given a disused Buddhist lamasery in which to celebrate Divine Liturgy; their Orthodox priests were in fact originally called ‘lamas’. Most of them took Chinese surnames: Yakovlev became Yao 姚; Dubinin, Du 杜; Romanov, Luo 羅; Khabarov, He 何; Kholostov, He 賀. And they intermarried with Manchurian women, gradually adopting Manchu and Chinese customs as their own – this was the situation which faced the Russian missionaries there.

In any event, the Russian Mission was chartered by Tsar Peter the Great to serve this population; however, it soon developed several additional purposes, including missionary ones, diplomatic ones (the Russian Mission often being the primary go-between between the Tsarist and the Qing governments), and scholarly ones. In particular, the last decades of the 18^th century and the first decades of the 19^th saw an immense broadening and deepening of the significance of this mission with the work of Archimandrites Hyacinth (Bichurin) and Peter (Kamensky).

Some background on the state and purposes of China scholarship in Europe, and the phenomenon of chinoiserie, would not be amiss here. The first people to bring knowledge of China back to Europe were the Jesuit missions, the most famous of which was headed by Matteo Ricci, who arrived in China about 100 years before the Albazinians did. The Jesuits are not to be wholly despised: they deserve ample credit for facilitating a massive cultural and scientific exchange between China and Western Europe. But it can’t be denied that they had, and have, a certain agenda in how they presented – nay, advertised – China to a modernising Europe. The Jesuits facilitated and encouraged the development of European chinoiserie, which flourished in cities and in aristocratic circles throughout Western Europe – Germany, Spain, England, Poland and France – as well as Russia. As Archimandrite Peter’s biographer notes:

[18^th century] Europe was marked by the vogue of everything Chinese, in large part formed by French Jesuit missionaries. However, their works showed China as a fabulous, visionary world partly [reminiscent of] the town of Kitëzh—a messianic town veiled from the eyes of those who aren’t enlightened by faith and purity. Russia, closely connected with Europe, was not immune to such a vogue. Catherine the Great, for example, was in correspondence with Voltaire about Confucius…

The ancient doctrine of Confucianism was understood as cursorily as Chinese art was delicately adapted for the enjoyment of the aristocracy. Amusing bucolic scenes and grotesque ornaments à la chinoise made by European artists were as far from real China as Confucius’ quotes translated by Russian sentimentalists were far from the original ones. Bizarre rococo fantasies materialised in theatrical performances and masquerades, bamboo bridges and tea-houses, pavilions and towers that decorated English, French, Polish and Russian palace gardens were only the extravagant inventions of these very Europeans. This artistic world, surprisingly combining the antique with Chinese, and rocaille with classics, became ingrained in Russian culture in the second half of the 18^th [and]the beginning of the 19^th centuries.

On a brief personal aside, I should note here that I have a rather complex relationship to 18^th-century chinoiserie, and not a wholly negative one. Yes, I’ve griped about Voltaire and his self-serving coöptation of Confucius – but I’ve also expressed a certain admiration, both political and æsthetic, for Bill Hatchett’s equally self-serving coöptation of Ji Junxiang for the purposes of mocking Horace Walpole. There is a great deal of chinoiserie, fantastic and ‘extravagant’ though it may be, that may have an artistic and even intellectual merit in its own right.

But, of course, the problem with chinoiserie, which is the problem with all orientalism, is that it renders a living, breathing non-Western tradition of [art, handicraft, music, literature] senseless and silent in the service of a Westerner’s fantasy of the same. And that fantasy often comes saddled with a great deal of intellectual baggage; when the reality fails to live up to that fantasy, violent recrimination is often the result. And no, I’m not talking about Keziah Daum; there’s an important and very serious difference between wearing a dress because it’s pretty, and indulging an untrue and harmful fantasy. The fetishisation of the Asian-feminine; the ‘othering’ of the Asian mind; the paranoid fear of being overrun by a faceless horde from the East – all of these ‘types’, though they have roots further back, seem to find their first sprouts in this period. And the Society of Jesus, for the purposes of promoting their missions abroad, absolutely did have a significant rôle in cultivating both the ‘Shangri-La’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’ fantasies, particularly in France.

Perhaps it was inescapable on account of gæography, that the task of promoting a clearer and truer picture of China would fall to the Russians. Both Archimandrite Hyacinth (Bichurin) and Archimandrite Peter (Kamensky) already had a certain breadth of perspective which allowed them to be more generous and sympathetic: Hyacinth himself was a member of a Central Asian minority (the Chuvash people), and Peter was an avid linguist, versant in Ancient Greek and Latin, who had already undertaken translation and lexical work in the Tatar, Chuvash and Mari languages. As the head of the Ninth Russian Mission in Beijing, Archimandrite Hyacinth was exceedingly scrupulous, perhaps even a touch too much so, in his promotion of Chinese materials: he recommended that Russians interested in China studies ought first to undertake studies of Russia’s ‘near abroad’: Tatarstan, Qazaqstan, Dzungharia, Mongolia and Tibet. One of Archimandrite Hyacinth’s lasting accomplishments and legacies in China scholarship was his thorough and psychologically-astute volume on Chinese Grammar, which historian Christoph Harbsmeyer has described as ‘deserving of careful comparison’ with the work especially of his contemporary Pierre Abel-Rémusat, and generally ‘sadly neglected by Western sinologists’.

As for the student Pavel Kamensky, though he may have started out his studies and life in Beijing with a somewhat sentimentalised understanding of China, he was very quickly disabused of it, though to his credit he did not succumb to the violent disillusionment that would characterise much of Western Europe (and, indeed, later Solovyov). But, with a typically-Slavic candour, he did leave some ‘unflattering estimations’ of prior missionary-based works on China; for example:

[The] Chinese notes of Jesuit [Jean Joseph Marie] Amiot are a body without a soul. Though he was a repertory of learning, these works really are not only good for nothing but also harmful. He … explained nothing. Moreover, he absolutely dishonestly tried to complicate the things that had been explained before. Hiding behind Chinese names he wrote such bogus stories that were unheard-of in China despite its dateless antiquity. The senseless contradictions that you can see in every line can prove my words.

As his biographer put it:

Acquaintances with real China, its philosophy, culture, state structure, religious and everyday life gave Pavel Kamensky an opportunity to keep a sensible view on China for life. This view was far from the romanticisation of China’s image and mythologisation of its spiritual traditions, but at the same time far from an ignorant neglect of Chinese culture.

In addition, upon his return from Beijing Pavel Kamensky immediately set about making recommendations for the Mission’s reform, including setting standards for competence and specialisation for new missionaries before they entered China, and greater cultural sensitivity among the missionaries for (northern) Chinese customs and dietary restrictions. His proposals attracted attention, and he apparently had to be pressured into undertaking the head of the Tenth Russian Mission (and with it, the tonsure, the rank of Archimandrite, and the monastic name of Peter). Sadly, he was bound to butt heads with his predecessor in the office Archimandrite Hyacinth, whom the newly-tonsured Archimandrite Peter apparently lambasted for his lukewarm missionary work. For his part, Archimandrite Hyacinth reciprocated with a bitter grudge against his successor, and complained about the new Mission head’s purported lack of scholarly rigour and poor linguistic attainments in Chinese and Mongolian.

However, Archimandrite Peter was no slouch in scholarship himself. Though his primary focus was on re-catechising and re-evangelising the descendants of the Albazinians (which he did with great affection and care), he nonetheless compiled the first Russian translation of the Analects and adding to the Russian store of knowledge dozens of Chinese gazetteers as well as more important classical Chinese works on gæography and law. Archimandrite Peter was a keen and insightful reader of the Chinese Classics, and if he was unsparing toward contemporary European commentaries on them, it was largely on account of his familiarity with the originals. However, he was also to exclaim, late in his life:

Oh, China! You carried away so much of my priceless time. I spent 27 years dealing only with your mechanical tasks, yet I’m comforted by it because I lost this time fulfilling my office. If not, I could not bemoan it with any tears. These Chinese activities, day and night, not only prevent your accumulation of knowledge but deprive it through their permanence.

Russia herself is in a rather unique position. Poised between the West and the Far East – as we can see in this very history of thought! – Russia has a dual perspective, being both the object of Western orientalist fantasy, and the subject of fantasies it borrows from thence. And Russia has often been faced with the temptation to orientalise herself for various reasons. The good common sense of people like Archimandrite Peter (Kamensky) has been a valuable gift along multiple dimensions.

It seems there was something almost providential in Russia’s realist approach to China studies in the very early days of the 19^th century, well before the revival of the field in Western Europe and America under Legge, Waley, Gabelentz and Julien. But it is more than a frustration and a shame, to compare this pivotal rôle played by these two remarkable Russian scholar-monks, with the bleak and dismal state of China studies in Russia today. Particularly given the unique confluence of gæostrategic, œconomic and cultural interests between the two, it seems a scandal to think that the academic and political work in Russia needed to sustain and inform this opportunity is sorely flagging.

The paradox of personhood and selflessness

Laozi 老子

One of the great benefits of reading Berdyaev in conjunction with Eastern philosophers like Laozi 老子 and Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒, and poets like Qu Yuan 屈原 and Wen Yiduo 聞一多, is that you get a clear sense of the complementarity of the truths offered by the Russian tradition (which is really to say: the Greek Academic philosophical tradition always already filtered through a Christian lens) and those offered by the still more ancient Chinese philosophical tradition. The book Christ the Eternal Tao by the Serbian Orthodox Hieromonk Damascene is one I have been mulling on for a while now; eventually I will have to go back to the Daodejing 《道德经》 and look for the points of contact in greater depth.

But one thing that struck me about Hieromonk Damascene’s book (and he is one excellent writer, by the way), is how adeptly he sorts the genius of Western wisdom from that of Chinese philosophy. My father-confessor at St Herman’s and I were discussing this book the other day. I cannot take credit for a lot of the insights that follow; those must go to Fr Paul or to Hieromonk Damascene. In any event, Hieromonk Damascene avoids both the sillier, shallow forms of New Age jargon and jumbling, as well as the blinkered, chauvinistic view of Derrida (or Žižek) that Chinese people are incapable of philosophy.

Instead, he focusses on the ability of Western thought, in conjunction with the Hebrew prophetic tradition, to grasp the importance of the personal. Moses and Elijah beheld (though they were not and could not be aware of the full truth of it) the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God. The Hebrew God—is a personal God. Not an idea or a concept or a mental construct. We human beings are each a crafted icon, an image-and-likeness, of the Divine. This is precisely the Mosaic-prophetic intuition. However, the difficulty in the West is in attributing to the personal God those aspects of self-will which we manifest in our fallen state. At worst, the Hebrew prophets interpreted their God as a stern lawgiver, a monad and a grim Lord of vengeance; at their best, they could see within God the patience of a loving Father, but these glimpses were rare. The Hebrews were expecting, not Christ, but a Saviour of a very different sort.

The intuition of Laozi, on the other hand, is that the divine Being, or Way, or Dao 道, is perfectly selfless. It makes no demands, it does not stand on its own rights, it does not force itself, it does not ratiocinate or justify or excuse itself, it does not inflict violence or destroy the other to build itself up. It has no self-will, no ego. It simply is. The idea of wu wei 無為 supposes an absence of will, a selfless simplicity. However, this too has been broadly misunderstood and misinterpreted. The Daoist ideal of selflessness was applied to rulership, and ended up bolstering a kind of Legalistic doctrine wherein the personal characteristics of ruler and minister are both obscured as heavily as possible. Alternatively, the Daoist principle of wu wei has been politically misappropriated to support liberaltarianism and anarchism of various shades, even though all of these interpretations involve political assertions of desire, egotism and self-will that are in fact contrary to wu wei. When one thus de-emphasises personality, ideology begins to take hold. Small wonder the 18^th-century Yijing 《已經》 scholar and Daoist master Liu Yiming 劉一明 complained:

七十二家炉火事，三千六百淫邪功。
以盲引盲迷正路，阻挡学人入牢笼。

There are 72 schools of material alchemy, and 3,600 aberrant practices. Since the blind lead the blind, they lose sight of the right road; they block students and lead them into a pen.

The dangers of overemphasising independence (which leads to egotism, judgmentalism, and ultimately a kind of dead legalism), and overemphasising nothingness (which leads to an emptying of the content of life and a reification of bureaucratic forms, another kind of legalism), are thus made apparent. Both truths have to be held simultaneously, a paradox beyond the grasp of classical philosophy, whether East or West. Equally fascinating, though, are the trinitarian presentiments which Hieromonk Damascene attributes to Laozi in the Daodejing. Hieromonk Damascene puts a particular emphasis on Daodejing 42, which begins:

道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物。

The Dao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things.

The idea is that Laozi had an insight into the triune nature of the Divine. But here Laozi approaches them as though they are something akin to Platonic numbers; they are not treated as persons. The operation of the Trinity was intuited by Laozi, however the personal nature was not seen, only intuited. As the Chinese Daoist philosopher and teacher of Hieromonk Damascene and Fr Seraphim Rose, Gi-Ming Shien (or Shen Jiming 申紀明), put it, the Three of Laozi represents ‘the reconciliation of opposites’, that it is ‘the principle of order’ which ‘produces all things’.

However, the primary thrust of the book – a philosophical insight common to the personalism of Orthodoxy and shared by the Desert Fathers, Nikolai Berdyaev, Dr Martin Luther King, Rowan Williams and others – is that the person can be selfless. This is what Hieromonk Damascene calls the ‘paradox of personhood and selflessness’. The person and the individual are not identical; the person is not merely a rights-bearer; the person and the ego are not the same thing. The personhood of the Trinity is not only unselfish but in fact selfless, non-monadic; it is erotic and kenotic: it begets and it proceeds out of itself; it pours itself out and is continually renewed. This continual dynamic self-emptying as a cosmic principle of order is something that Laozi himself intuited:

道沖而用之或不盈。淵兮似萬物之宗。

The Dao is (like) the emptiness of a vessel; and in our employment of it we must be on our guard against all fulness. How deep and unfathomable it is, as if it were the Honoured Ancestor of all things!

We thus come to the nub of the argument. There really are only Three Persons in one single substantive Being, and we among the wanwu 萬物, the myriad things produced by this Three-Persons-in-One-Being, are all icons of that Being and those Persons. But insofar as we are fallen; that is, insofar as we insist on our selves, our individuality, our sufficiency unto ourselves as little gods and little idols, our personhood is actually diminished. The paradox of personhood is that it can be realised only through selflessness: the selflessness of the Dao, the selflessness of the Way in which we were created. In our darkened state we become substantive, we become person, only by losing our selves, and by loving others in the way that we were loved when the Lover of Mankind made us.

There is a great deal of philosophical truth worth pondering and discussing in Christ the Eternal Tao, and again it strikes me that I need to re-read the Daodejing in order to get more out of the centrepiece and commentaries of the book. That said, I certainly invite my readers to take a stab at reading Christ the Eternal Tao as well.