Meekness and generosity are the way out

The recent crisis in worldwide Orthodoxy over Ukrainian autocephaly has reached a new and dangerous precipice, with the Œcumenical Patriarchate unilaterally lifting the anathemas on the schismatic body of the ‘Kiev Patriarchate’ and establishing communion with them. This action, more so than any the Moscow Patriarchate has taken yet, is probably closer to a ‘nuclear option’ than any that has been taken so far. And my first and foremost reaction has been one of grief. I had indeed hoped that the calls for sobornyi unity and a conciliar solution to the autocephaly problem issuing, not only from my own church, but also from the churches of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Cyprus, Poland, Bulgaria, Serbia and the Czech and Slovak Lands, would be enough to make the Œcumenical Patriarch reconsider. Unfortunately, it looks as though we were mistaken. With our Arab brothers we have to mourn how far we have lost sight of Christ.

N.b., how the Orthodox ecclesiastical expressions in the non-aligned global south are arrayed on this: Yugoslavia, Asia, Africa. And then note how the wealthy and well-connected local Orthodox churches in the West are aligned. If Wallerstein were Orthodox, he might have a thing or two to say about this – and even though he isn’t Orthodox, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t listen to him. The political schema of ‘core’, ‘semi-periphery’ and ‘periphery’ is equally valid here: and the ‘periphery’ clearly doesn’t want this to come to a full-blown schism within the Church. But that is what it is looking like, more and more.

This grieves me deeply. The problem with the Orthodox Church is that we have both the ideal and the imperfect historical realisations of sobornost’ before us. But we have yet to embrace them of our own will in the absence of an Emperor. This leaves us in a precarious situation in which the realms of politics and ecclesiastical affairs are confused. There are serious questions raised by this controversy which require answers found in the light of truth and in the light of agapē, but which are relegated to the corners by political concerns. How is church autocephaly decided? What is the correct relation of the Church to the State? What is the correct relation of the Church to the ethnic-linguistic nation? To what extent, and on whose behalf, should the Church involve itself in questions of political action? I believe that the Orthodox Church as a whole already possesses the correct approaches to these questions. (I am also far from neutral on this question: I believe that the attitudes and actions of the government of the Ukraine and the Œcumenical Patriarchate are fundamentally at odds with that approach.) However, we, the believers – and that includes priests, monks, metropolitans and patriarchs as well as us laymen – are darkened by self-love, by selfish interests and calculations, by desire for power. Says the Master of all in the Gospel of St Mark,

Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

With the Patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople squabbling and fighting like James and John over who gets the power and the glory and who gets to sit at the right hand, is there anyone among us in this entire situation who can be found willing to be the ‘servant of all’ after Christ’s word to His apostles? For the life of me, the only one I can see in this entire mess, who has been even imperfectly a public exemplar of this ethic of servanthood rather than mastery and lust for dominance, has been Metropolitan Onufriy – and it is his lack of political ambition which has made him a hated figure in the eyes of the legal scribes, princes and powers. Given the threats he faces, would it be too great a stretch to say that Metropolitan Onufriy, in his powerlessness and studied neutrality, is arrayed against Herod, Pilate and Caiaphas, who seem to have decided between them that it would be preferable for one man – and his part of the Orthodox Church – to die for the sake of the nation?

In the meantime, we cannot pretend that the current bone of contention has nothing to do with us, the Orthodox Church in America. The problem is here, with us. Though our origins are in the missions of the Russian Church to the Native Alaskans, the pivot of our historical witness has been the immigration of Ruthenians to these shores, including from the territory which is now included in the Ukraine, and their reconversion to Orthodoxy through resistance to the combined ideological power of capitalism, assimilationism and Americanist Catholicism. The American Orthodox witness reached back into the ‘old country’ through people like Holy Father Aleksei of Khust, to the chagrin of the Austrian-Hungarian authorities.

We, the laypeople of the Orthodox Church in America, are tied to both sides of this conflict in the Ukraine, by blood and water. Through the imagery, that is to say the iconographic imagery of ‘blood and water’, it should not be lost on us that we are called to be crucified with them. Given this history, and given our habitual silence in the face of the wrongs committed by our government, it may be up to us to show meekness in defiance of our own culture, in defiance of the flesh and in defiance of the reigning political logic. Perhaps we could do so by offering up, without defence, our own disputed tomos of autocephaly to a pan-Orthodox synaxis. We would then humbly abide by their judgement in the hopes that a principle and a body for church autocephaly might result. I am not saying that this is the answer or even the preferable course of action. But I do suspect that it will take such conscious acts of meekness and aggressive generosity to undo the Gordian knot of suspicion, cynicism, imperial legacy, ethnic-national and ecclesiastical pride that has only tightened with every pull made by a powerful Patriarch.

The hour is later than we think. Already, we must observe, the Church’s enemies are exulting in our confusion and selfish quarrelling; they believe they have scored a victory. Even though, as Fr Andrew (Damick) puts it, we do not refer victories and losses to ‘the immanent frame’, we still participate (or refuse to participate) in the final victory of Christ through our words and actions here and now. May we not be found jostling over who is greatest, or worse still plotting to kill the Heir to the vineyard in our hearts when He comes.

A pæan to Svetozar Marković

Having been on something of a ‘Balkans kick’ recently, I decided to tackle Woodford McClellan’s political biography of Svetozar Marković, the tragically short-lived first socialist theorist of the Balkans. Marković is a singularly fascinating figure who – in my view – stands at the very spot where socialism and distributism, at least in its radical-agrarian Eastern European sense, begin to diverge. Although a narodnik student of Chernyshevsky, he flirted with a broad range of intellectual influences, from Marx to Bakunin to Dühring. As a result, his socialism was a highly syncretist brew of a number of different convictions – sometimes contradicting. Though he had a sincere and naïve faith in the power of scientific knowledge to guide all human inquiry (including in ethics and religion), his practically-Slavophil sympathy for the peasantry, his distaste for revolution and his emphasis on the need to adapt theory to ‘local conditions’ set him apart from practically all of his Marxist contemporaries, with the possible exception of Karl Kautsky. The successes of Marković as a publicist can be seen in the fact that socialism nowhere enjoyed a greater following (apart from in Russia) than in Serbia of his time. The agrarian-distributists and left-anarchists as well as the socialists who came after him would come to see him as an intellectual forerunner. However, he clearly leaned (as did Tawney) to the socialist side.

McClellan’s monograph doubles as both a biography and as a history of Serbian left politics. For a figure such as Svetozar Marković such a format seems deeply appropriate: even though he died at the age of 28, all of the Balkan socialists, communists and radicals who followed him would say that they ‘learned their political ABC’s from Marković’. However, such importance attaching to the figure of Marković seems ironic for a number of reasons – his early death from congenital illness compounded by a torturous imprisonment being only one of them. McClellan deeply admires his subject, but is not blind to his flaws. The Marković he portrays in this careful and multi-layered work is a pugnacious polemicist and intellectual pugilist; but his sharp intellect, owing partly to the eagerness of youth, is not able to compass many of the broad theoretical contradictions in the thought of his intellectual heroes. In addition, he has a broad egotistical streak, a flair for the dramatic, and a certain romanticism of outlook that prohibits him from being an efficacious politician when the crucial moments come. Still, McClellan gives Marković a good deal of credit: he never went overboard into nihilism, and his abiding faith in the Serbian peasantry prevented his thought from venturing into totalitarian territory.

The Marković family hailed from occupied Kosovo, but moved to Donja Sabanta (and later Kragujevac) after Svetozar’s great-uncles killed a Turk in an act of private justice, the Turk having molested one of his great-aunts. Svetozar’s father Radoje had been an adherent of Karađorđe and his family in the dynastic feud between the Karađorđevići and the Obrenovići. Radoje married well – the daughter of the village prefect – and had two sons: the elder Jevrem in 1839, and the younger Svetozar in 1846. Svetozar went to a series of public schools, from grammar up through university – and his experiences with the stern and often-abusive teachers throughout his education instilled in him a deep and abiding distaste for the traditional pædagogy (a trait he shares with his Coptic comrade of a younger generation, Salama Musa). During his school years he was an adherent – as were most of his classmates – of the radical-liberalism of Vladimir Jovanović, and also a member of Jovanović’s youth movement Omladina (a society based on Mazzini’s Young Italy), advocating the liberation of Serbia and the adoption of a constitutional monarchy.

After his secondary schooling, however, Marković studied abroad in Russia and at once fell under the intellectual sway of Russia’s foremost narodnik theorist, Nikolai Chernyshevsky (author of What Is to Be Done? and the literary bête noire of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground). Marković joined the Smorgon Academy, a veritable hotbed of narodnik and nihilist radicalism, and there formed the friendships and connexions that would inform the rest of his life of the intellect. Marković’s one constant influence from which he never wavered was that of Chernyshevsky. He garnered a number of insights from Marx, and from the popularisers of Feuerbach, Darwin and several others – but he always grounded them in the convictions of Chernyshevsky’s agrarian populism.

Svetozar Marković’s international horizons would broaden from a trip to Zürich. He was a gadfly to a number of meetings of radicals from around Europe, including the League of Peace and Freedom and the First International. He made the acquaintances of Bakunin and Marx, as well as Victor Hugo, Charles Longuet and Amand Goegg. It was a mark of Marković’s breadth of political imagination, if also his theoretical vagueness, that he was able to speak good words of all of the programmes of Bakunin, Lassalle and Marx – but find nothing good to say about the bourgeois French republicans led by Hugo. His distaste for bourgeois republicanism and liberalism as insufficiently radical would follow him back to Serbia.

When Marković returned from Russia, he found that the Serbian liberals – including Jovanović, whom he had so admired in his student days – had essentially ‘sold out’. The vast majority of the Omladina had joined the government of Prince Milan Obrenović and the ranks of the fledgling Serbian bureaucracy, and were busying themselves securing their own positions and advancing their own interests rather than advocating for greater autonomy or greater social rights for the vast majority of Serbians, who were still on the land and suffering from eviction, debt, usury and bureaucratic intransigence. Marković immediately set about founding a new radical youth movement which was strident in its opposition to the government, and to Jovanović in particular. This would begin one of a long series of no-holds-barred scorched-earth intellectual feuds between the uncompromising polemicist Svetozar Marković and a number of more liberal-leaning and pro-establishment Serbs. During this time, however, Marković also developed friendships with radicals and insurrectionaries in Bulgaria – most importantly that with Lyuben Karavelov.

Marković’s ‘eclectic, ethical socialist’ thought at this time, when he published ‘The Realist Direction in Science and Life’, was at its most Marxist in hue. He embraced materialism and scientism with both arms, and Darwin was his lodestar. The application of the scientific method and mindset, Marković believed, would eventually solve all of humanity’s problems – even the ethical. The highest, most advanced and most evolved ethics, he held, were those of Robert Owen, Ján Hus and Jesus Christ. Marković parted with the socialist proclaimers of free love and defended monogamous ‘matrimony’ (as distinguished from a propertarian understanding of ‘marriage’) on what we would now consider evolutionary-psychological grounds. And he held the narodnik belief that the Slavic East – including Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia – would be able to find an agrarian road to socialism that wouldn’t go through the oppressive travails of capitalism.

In the early phase of Marković’s Serbian career, he directed a coöperative movement similar to Raiffeisen’s and Krek’s, or the Grange here in the United States. His coöperatives unfortunately suffered from the same problems that hindered the Grange and the Populists here – lack of enthusiasm; competition among members of the coöperative; predatory anti-competitive practices by private lenders and producers. Suffice it to say that Marković’s movement itself was short-lived. He also founded a newspaper, Radenik, which served as an outlet for his harsh criticisms of the government and of various liberal intellectuals, bureaucrats and businessmen. In many ways, Radenik was a sister-publication to the Bulgarian Svoboda (Lyuben Karavelov’s journal which served as an informational and propaganda vehicle for the Bulgarian revolutionaries). It also had a limited reach: it appealed primarily to socialists, and to intellectual radicals of the ‘opposition’ – liberals out-of-favour with a liberal government. It had cachet, but little real traction among the peasantry it claimed to speak for. It still caused consternation in the government, however. Its publishers were harassed, its issues confiscated, and it was eventually forced to shut down. Marković himself was forced into exile in Novi Sad, in Vojvodina.

Marković published prolifically in Novi Sad. He put out a book, Serbia in the East, which argued for Serbia’s separate agrarian path to socialism in more nuanced terms, and also put forward a ‘bottom-up’ version of Yugoslavism in which the local communes would play the ultimate part in horizontally uniting the Balkans. Aided by his caring, sympathetic and convinced elder brother Jevrem, Svetozar’s cause attracted intellectuals like Nikola Pašić, military men like Sava Grujić, and even Orthodox priests like Vasa Pelagić. He developed a strong friendship (and perhaps also romantic attachment) to a pair of sisters in Novi Sad, Milica and Anna Ninković, who were at once drawn to his radical narodnik ideas and became his steadfast supporters both intellectually and practically. He began laying plans for a revolt in Hercegovina, which would come to fruition after his death. And he also broke, dramatically, with Mikhail Bakunin over anarchism, which (for reasons similar to those held by Morris and Berdyaev) he could not embrace. He began refining his socialist political thought into a cogent programme; in this he further distanced himself from Marx. It was preposterous to think that Marx’s thought could be adapted to Serbia without accounting for the predominance of the peasantry and the absence of both a proletariat and an industrial business class. The exploiters in Serbia were kulaks, usurers and bureaucrats.

For Marković, the poverty and oppression of the peasant at the hands of landlords, kulaks, usurers and bureaucrats was intolerable, and the effete and inadequate legal protections provided by the liberal government infuriating. The further impoverishment and ‘primitive accumulation’ from the peasant in the name of establishing capitalism as a necessary stage in Serbia’s œconomic development, as demanded by the doctrinaire Marxists, was likewise indefensible to him. Though he acknowledged and endorsed the validity of Marxist theory in the West, where class divisions were already manifest and a proletariat had already been created, he could never bring himself to countenance the full political ramifications of Marxist thought in the Slavic East. He was firm in the narodnik conviction that the Slavic countries could forge their own path to socialism without going through capitalism.

Eventually, however, he made the determination to return to Belgrade (where he was promptly arrested, though released on bail) and start another journal: Javnost. Javnost was very unlike Radenik in tone: it was impassive rather than polemical; analytical rather than denunciatory. It was here that Marković took up his spirited defence of the peasant zadruga as the vehicle for the peasant’s self-liberation and the achievement of a radical œconomic democracy. However, the conclusions of Javnost were no less unwelcome to the Serbian government, and its staff came in for no less harassment and legal action.

Many of the charges from the government were nonsensical. He was accused of libelling and maligning various members of government (though he maintained he had printed nothing but truth). He was accused of disloyalty to Serbia and of insulting the Prince. And he was accused – probably with his father’s services to Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević in mind – of harbouring dynastic sympathies for the exiled Karađorđevići. Marković mostly laughed these charges off. He wasn’t straightforward enough a republican to admit so explicitly, but if he did have any dynastic sympathies they were instead with the ruling house of Montenegro, and in particular with Prince Nikola I Petrović-Njegoš (maternal grandfather of King Aleksandar of Yugoslavia), whom Marković apparently regarded as a progressive ruler.

Marković, along with one of his associates, Dimitrije Stojković, was arrested on these charges and put on trial. It seems Marković had planned to make the best of his arrest: he used his trial to grandstand in defence of socialism and to attack the government and legal system as unjust, and apparently did such a good job of it that Serbian peasants gathered in Kragujevac en masse in protest of the trial.

Marković was of course found guilty and sentenced to 18 months in gaol – an effective death sentence, given his poor health and consumptive constitution. Javnost was forced to cease publication, but Marković continued to write from prison. Once released he sought out his brother Jevrem to recuperate, but to little avail – and he began another newspaper, Oslobođenje, which was shut down even more quickly than Javnost. However, Marković’s thought continued to evolve away from Marxism: he began to distrust the intellectuals and put more and more trust in the peasants themselves to self-organise and self-advocate. He also, in the last days of his life, embraced the Orthodox faith to which he had been a stranger since his school days. As he was dying of consumption in the city of Trst, he sought out Fr Bogoljub (Toponarski) and asked for confession and last rites, which were given. He also asked the priest to send for his brother, who didn’t make it in time. Only Fr Bogoljub and the deacon at the local Church of Saint Spyridon were present at the funeral of Svetozar Marković.

McClellan clearly considers the legacy of Marković with a mixture of sympathy and tragedy. Though he takes no more favourable a view of the viability of Marković’s ideas within his own time and place than the later Yugoslav historians do, he clearly prefers the principles on which Marković professed his peasant-populism. And he also manifestly has a more generous evaluation of Marković’s significance in Balkan intellectual life in mind – because he does trace the independent evolution of Yugoslav œconomic democracy and zadrugarstvo to the influence and ideas of Marković. Just as Fei Xiaotong was the unsung hero of Taiwan’s œconomic miracle, so too was Svetozar Marković a tutor to Tito in his healthier moments.

Though Svetozar Marković was not a distributist (his zadrugarstvo was, in the final analysis, a familial-communal collectivism in land rather than a loose coöperativism of private holdings), the distributists too would do well to look to his legacy in order to better understand the popularity of their own œconomic doctrine in Eastern Europe. The distributists did best when they flocked at least some distance to the distinctly redder-hued flag of Marković, like his intellectual successors Sterea and Madgearu in Romania, or Stamboliyski in Bulgaria. And even in our own day, we can and should consider Marković more carefully as non-Western countries attempt to forge their own œconomic paths out of the late-capitalist blind alley we’re in. As we face a looming global œcological disaster, we are in dire need of œconomic alternatives to capitalism and a ‘convergence’ that never quite seems to happen – alternatives, indeed, that are adaptable to ‘local conditions’ as Marković envisioned.

King Aleksandar I Karađorđević of Yugoslavia

The assassination of Aleksandar I Karađorđević, King of Yugoslavia on 9 October 1934, was a horrific crime and a tragedy for the South Slavic lands. The crazed assassin, who killed or wounded fifteen people while firing wildly in his regicidal rage, was a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, a far-right fascist party with links to the Croatian Ustaše. The good and great man whose life he ended, on the other hand, had been a consistent and firm believer in the Yugoslav ideal of a state which would transcend ethnicity, and also an equally redoubtable opponent of fascism wherever the gruesome right-wing ideology reared its ugly head: whether in Italy or Germany or Croatia or Macedonia.

Aleksandar Karađorđević, born in exile in Montenegro to King Petar I of Serbia and Princess Ljubica Petrović-Njegoš of that country (daughter of then-Prince Nikola of Montenegro), was forbidden by law from entering his home country on account of the feud between his family and the Obrenovići who ruled Serbia at the time. Nonetheless, early on cultivated a sense of civic duty. He served as an Imperial Page in the Russian Army. His father took power after a brutal military coup that ended the Obrenovići in a particularly bloody fashion, and then later became Crown Prince when his violent and short-tempered elder brother Đorđe forfeited his claim to the Serbian throne after a scandal. He served as an army commander in the Balkan Wars during the early 1910s, and later as Prince-Regent as his father’s health began to fail. He assumed a commanding rôle in the Great War, heroically defending Serbia from Austria-Hungary until a series of defeats in 1915 against August von Mackensen led to his withdrawing the Serbian Army to Corfu. On Corfu, Aleksandar regrouped and reorganised the army, to great effect: when the Serbian Army landed again at Thessaloniki under his guidance, the Serbian Army played a spirited and significant part in the Allies’ final march to victory, routing the Central Powers’ troops at the battle of Kajmakcalan.

Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević was a very popular leader at this time, very similar to Shakespeare’s version of Prince Hal. He was close to his troops, and trusted them – and they him. The army he commanded was tough, egalitarian, not overly-concerned with rank; and he, their commander, was considered a ‘prince among the people’. At the same time, he was a dynamic, ambitious and at times ruthless reformer; in this he resembled Tsar Stefan Dušan – or at least the Yugoslavist mythological remembrance of him. Like the Serbian-Byzantinist Yugoslavists who came before him, too, he always held that the Serbian nation would be central to building a unified South Slavic state. He managed to achieve this in the last years of his father’s life: after the Great War ended, King Petar I was proclaimed the King of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs – a title which Prince Aleksandar himself inherited in 1923. By that time, Prince Aleksandar had married Princess Maria Hohenzollern of Romania, who became a highly-respected Queen among the Serbs: known for her charitable work and social philanthrōpia, her humility and her devotion to her family.

Of Aleksandar’s rule itself, little is known of his own attitudes since he kept no diary. However, his policies were always aimed at maintaining his own kingdom as a strongly-centralised unitary state. In this policy he could also be quite ruthless. His gendarmes violently suppressed movements that were considered subversive, that were aimed at federalising the kingdom, that smacked of ethnic separatism or religious chauvinism. These policies, understandably, earned him few friends within his kingdom – particularly among the Croats, the Slovenes or the Macedonians. The authoritarian style of King Aleksandar’s rule was aimed particularly at warding off the threats from Mussolini’s Italy (which sought to reclaim Slovenia and Dalmatia) and the rise of reactionary revanchist politics in Hungary. However, he maintained warm relations with the new Czechoslovak Republic and with the kingdoms of Bulgaria and Romania – it was he who forged both the Little Entente (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania) and the Balkan Entente (Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia) as defensive alliances against the great powers between the wars. (Tito’s policy of active non-alignment and disengagement from great power blocs was far from original – in foreign policy, too, there is continuity between the Kingdom and the Socialist Federal Republic.)

Unfortunately, it seems a legitimate interpretation to say that King Aleksandar’s domestic policies aimed at fighting fascism became a self-fulfilling prophecy. He certainly didn’t create the Fascist, Nazi, Ustaše and IMRO threats against his life and rule. However, it is likely that his crackdowns generated sympathy for these far-right groups and played into the hands of his enemies abroad. The assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, was a fanatical Macedonian assassin of the IMRO, who had before cooperated closely with both the Italian Fascists and the Croatian Ustaše in carrying out terrorist attacks and assassinations on Yugoslav soil. He had significant support outside the country from the Italians and right-wing elements in Bulgaria, and also within the country. When the assassination occurred in Marseilles, France, it created a grave diplomatic incident, and Italy had to do some work to deny involvement in the killing to avoid war with France and Britain.

King Aleksandar’s funeral, held at the Church of Saint George in Topola, was attended by half a million grieving Yugoslavs as well as a number of European dignitaries. His son, Petar II, succeeded him as King, but his rule was short – he came of age during the Second World War, fought like his father had to defend his people, but was later forced from his throne and into exile by Tito’s Communist partizans after the war was over.

May Christ our God grant His servant Aleksandar rest in the sight of His glorious countenance and among the company of His saints, and keep him in everlasting remembrance!

Stavrianos on the nineteenth-century Balkans

It is by no means correct to state, as is so often done, that the Balkans were the ‘powder keg of Europe’. It was all Europe that provided the powder for the keg.

I recently finished reading a brief volume by the late historian Leften Stavros Stavrianos, The Balkans: 1815–1914. Stavrianos’s book is a brisk but remarkably powerful history on an eventful period – it actually begins with the revolts of Black George in 1804 and the Greeks in 1821, and ends with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Several themes crop up repeatedly: the first, of Turkish administrative reforms actually stoking the fires of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans, rather than appeasing them; the second, of the contradictions that arose between religious and ethnic belonging among the peoples of the region; and the third, of the Balkans as a ‘test case’ for the imposition of military-œconomic imperialism and finance capitalism by Western powers on foreign territories.

The cases of the Serbian and Greek revolts against Turkish rule show an Ottoman political structure that was unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the fallout of the commercial-capitalism and administrative decentralisation which its leadership actually did its best to encourage. Ironically, Turkish rule disintegrated precisely where and when it was most urgently driven to ‘reform’. Stavrianos indicates that the leader of the Serbian revolt, Đorđe Petrović (later known by his revolutionary sobriquet ‘Karađorđe’ or ‘Black George’), was, as a prosperous pig farmer, in fact a representative of the commercial class; the leaders of the Philikē Hetaireia (the Greek revolutionary secret society), too, were shipping agents and merchants. They were often placed in opposition to local bureaucrats, state functionaries and ‘dragomans’ who, though themselves Christian and Greek or Slavic, had high Ottoman connexions. The Phanariotes (the Greeks of the lighthouse district in Constantinople, among whom were selected the political and ecclesiastical leaders of Greeks under Ottoman rule) were for a long time opposed to their Greek brethren seeking independence. Likewise, the chiflik leaders were often drawn from local, rather than Turkish notables, and ruled their local fiefdoms in many cases more harshly than the Turks would have done.

And this is where we begin to see the third of these themes rear its head for the first time – the selective and often self-interested intrusion of the Western European powers in to Ottoman politics. The Greek bid for independence from the Ottomans was gladly supported by Britain, France and Russia. In this, the Europeans were led either by a philhellene idealism in the case of Britain and France, or by Orthodox religious solidarity (and the possibility of reconquering Constantinople) in the case of Russia. But the realpolitik of nineteenth-century Europe reared its head in the case of the Serbs – unfortunately not even the Russians would support Karađorđe’s revolt, despite the natural ties of language and religion between the Serbs and the Russians. The first Serbian uprising ended in failure and base betrayal – as Miloš Obrenović, one of Karađorđe’s commanders, ordered him murdered and beheaded, and sent the head to the Turks to placate them. (This set the stage for a long and bloody dynastic feud between the Karađorđević and Obrenović houses.)

Later, the Great Powers moved in hungrily on the Balkans. Austria-Hungary and Russia were the big two imperial powers who managed to salami-slice bits and pieces off of the failing Ottomans, but Britain and France also had vested œconomic and cultural interests in the Ottoman lands. Britain, naturally, wanted to keep her mercantile interests and ready sea access to her Indian holdings that the Suez provided; France also had interests in the ‘holy places’ debate (and would for the foreseeable future), and found herself dragged deep into the cultural renaissance of the Romanians, who emphasised their shared Latin heritage. The formation of these power blocs in the Balkans actually managed to set the stage for the Crimean War, with both Britain and France siding against Russia over not only the Crimean Peninsula, but also over Palestine and Romania. The Crimean War was a perfect and spectacular conflagration of the vulgar-shopkeeper Whiggery of Britain’s mercantile-capitalist class (embodied in Lord Palmerston) and the quasi-Catholic sham piety of Napoleon III, as they clashed with the overbearing autocratic self-love of Nikolai I.

The Ottoman Empire then embarked on several broad-based reforms aimed at holding the other Great Powers at bay and keeping what was left of the rebellious Balkans inside the empire. This strategy backfired spectacularly. They often relied on local pashas to implement these reforms, who themselves behaved like little despots in their own fiefdoms – to murderous effect, as we have seen, in the Levant and in Ægypt. Instead of creating a singular Ottoman patriotism as they had intended to do, the reforms they bollocksed up (to put it crudely) instead managed to inflame nationalism in practically every area they touched. Palestinian, Syrian and Ægyptian Arab nationalisms all had their roots in the Ottoman reform movement. So too did the nationalisms of the Balkans – Bulgarian, Romanian and Serbian as well as Greek. Midhat Pasha of Bulgaria, though he was an effective ruler and dynamic reformer, nonetheless proved by the fact that his successors failed to measure up to his standard that he was an exception to the general rule.

Bulgarian nationalism at this time was as much mobilised, however, against Greek churchmen as it was against the Turks, and their anti-Greek fervour was precisely what precipitated Pobedonostsev, in a bit of anti-nationalist conservative sentiment, to back the Phanar against the Bulgarians (which he was right to do, in my own humble opinion). When the Bulgarians rose up against the Ottomans, however, the reprisal was bloody enough to earn the title of the ‘Bulgarian horrors’ in the Western press. Entire villages were burnt and tens of thousands of people butchered. I have noted before how accounts of the atrocities committed by the Ottomans against Bulgarian peasants managed to radicalise William Morris and play a significant part in turning him toward socialism. Bulgaria did, however, manage to gain its independence with help particularly from Russia.

The various interventions in the Balkans by the European powers continued, however – and the actually managed to provoke a split in British conservatism between the belligerent Disraeli and the more old-fashioned non-interventionist Lord Salisbury. For their part, the Whigs vacillated between the naked, vulgar greed of Lord Palmerston and the hypocritical sentimentalism of William Gladstone. But it demonstrated a growing trend of European interventions in the Balkans to maintain their commercial and œconomic interests – a trend which also beggared the Balkan peasantry. The sudden European interest and investment in the Balkans meant an equally-sudden transition to a money œconomy. Stavrianos dwells at length on how the growth of the money œconomy in the Balkans sent the peasantry into spiralling debt, created cottage industries of petty usury, unravelled the traditional communal solidarity that had prevailed in the Balkan zadruga and opština, and provoked a massive flood of people into the cities from the surrounding countryside. Capitalism, in its primordial form, was every bit as destructive on the traditional fabric of Balkan society as it has been anywhere else.

War was an almost-constant reality in the Balkans, and more often than not it had to do with the competing interests of the Great Powers. The road to Sarajevo 1914 was lined with constant violence – both over the fate of the Bosnian Serbs under Austria-Hungary, and over the fate of Macedonia (in which all three Orthodox countries of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece had material interests). The Yugoslav ideal has never been a mere peaceful pastime of disconnected intellectuals; it was largely forged in these conflicts, and posited as a solution to them – because it would guarantee a certain level of independence from these great power conflicts. Little wonder, also, that Yugoslavia would be so keen on the non-aligned movement in yet another era of great power conflicts! So when Stavrianos objects, roundly, to the stereotype of the Balkans as a ‘powder keg’ in Western European historiography, he is reacting precisely against an interpretation of history that makes the Balkans a scapegoat for the dysfunctionality and violence of Europe as a whole.

Stavrianos gives a good flavour for the land, the people and the various ethnic and religious divides; but he also keeps a realistic eye on the broader trends that have shaped the Balkans. I was somewhat surprised to see that his work dates from the 1960’s: it manages to presage certain revisionist forms of historiography that call into question the standard bromides of Cold War politics. Again, this is a brisk read, but I would certainly recommend it as an introductory text for recent Balkan history.

On Yemen – don’t despair

San‘â

I know I have complained a lot on this blog over the last two years about the stupidity and sheer evil of American war policy in Yemen: for example, here, here, here, here and here. Come to think of it, I’ve been complaining about it since 2014. I am also all too well-aware that such complaining actually has a tendency to produce fatigue and despondency. We have only so much ‘bandwidth’ for suffering before we shut down. And the way in which our news media inundates us with this suffering and outrage actually lessens our capacity for empathy. For my own part in this – and it is a part I fully admit I have played; I am as guilty of it as any other person with a keyboard, an Internet connexion and an inflated opinion of himself – I am sorry, and I beg my gentle readers’ forgiveness for it. I have been swayed by and contributed to this outrage fatigue.

That said, if we were to pick and choose something to be outraged by, this would have to be it. There is something wrong with a person who is not moved to pity and rage by the starvation of over ten million people. And if it were at the hands of our government and being committed in our names…! Because – let us be perfectly clear – the complicity in this starvation belongs overwhelmingly to the side that is blockading the port at al-Hudayda where food is supposed to arrive (still); that is turning clinics into targets; and that is bombing sources of clean water. Any drop or spot of blood that the Houthis have on their hands, is dwarfed by the utter deluge of it for which the Saudis, the Emiratis, and their allies – we Americans – must answer for.

Still, we should not give into despair. We should not throw up our hands and give Yemen up as hopeless. God does not turn His back on the poor or stop His ears to their prayers, and neither should we. The very first thing the Yemeni people need is for the bombs to stop falling, and for the Saudi-led blockade to end. As I have said before, there are several political pressure groups committing to achieving precisely this. In addition, we can also hold our elected officials accountable for this in a more direct way. E-mail them. Call them. If your Senator voted ‘yea’ here, particularly if they are Democrats, tell them you will withhold your vote for them unless they volte-face. The bombs have to stop falling – which means that we have to stop backing the Saudis. That’s the only way the humanitarian crisis in Yemen gets solved.

In the meantime, there are two very good, accountable local organisations that are helping families in Yemen get enough food, clothing, clean water, medicine and other basic supplies. They are running day to day and month to month, and can always use more financial assistance. These are Share Aid Yemen run by Qasim Ali al-Shawea, and Human Needs Development run by Adel Hashem. Please consider giving what you can. It will go to good use.

And, of course, pray for Yemen always. The elderly and the young; the orphans and the widows; the sick and the suffering; the sorrowing and the afflicted; the captives and the needy poor – the Orthodox Church commends all of these people to our prayers and to our actions. But, please, don’t despair.

Yugoslavia: an alter-Byzantine project

The multi-nation and political concept of Yugoslavia has always exerted a certain interest and intrigue in me – as much as, if not more so than, that of Czechoslovakia. I think I can safely say that it started in my middle-school days, with my Mennonite peace-church upbringing looking for humanity even in the popularly-dæmonised Serbs. It would only be much, much later that I would discover paternal ties of blood with the South Slavs. My wife, who grew up in mainland China, remembered seeing news photos of the carpet-bombing of Serbia when she was a child – that was how her own anti-war sentiments began; of course, this was shortly after the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was bombed by American planes.

In addition, the Yugoslavia which took shape after World War II was one of the ‘instigators, main drivers and pioneers’ of the Non-Aligned Movement – one of the only European countries, actually, to even join a movement inaugurated by the Bandung Conference and essentially centred around the East Asian, African, Arabic and Latin American civilisational ambits. Yugoslavia pursued diplomatic and trade policies that were anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and largely independent of both major superpower-led blocs. I would be lying if I said this didn’t render the entire project of Yugoslavia that much more endearing to me.

However, it was really a book by a friend of the family, The Participatory Œconomy by the late Czech-American œconomist Jaroslav Vaněk of Cornell University, which stoked my interest in the Balkan multi-nation, and specifically in its lost potentials as a multi-ethnic polity distinguished by a participatory ethic of socio-œconomic egalitarianism and a strong authoritarian power-vertical. Both of these aspects, as I would discover after swimming the Bosporus, are contained to some degree in the history and political praxis of the Eastern Roman Empire to which the South Slavs were at one time subject. (How ironic that a project that would come to be, and continues to be, associated so heavily with anti-imperialism itself had imperial roots. But that’s not only the Orthodox oikoumenē, not only Byzantium and Russia, but Chinese history as well!)

A recent article in Slavonic and East European Review by Dr Aleksandar Ignjatović, a professor of architecture at the University of Belgrade, elucidates the complicated and dialectical relationships between the historical memory and built legacy of Byzantium on the one hand, and the lasting (and, in fact, still-extant) attachment of the Serbian national consciousness to the multi-national project of Yugoslavia on the other – even as the ideology of Yugoslavism itself was being developed. Even as Serbian historiography transitioned between a Romantic nationalism and a more objective critical perspective, the linkages between the Serbia and Byzantium were drawn upon both for a sense of association and a sense of independence. The Serbian sense of its own identity drew upon both of these sources:

On the one hand, historiography reinforced a sense of association of Serbs with Byzantium, which was explained by the profound influence of Byzantine customs, art and culture on medieval Serbia. On the other hand, Serbia’s cultural and political emancipation and its differentiation from Byzantium were emphasised… Consequently, the position of Byzantium became ambivalent in [Serbian] historiography, simultaneously seen as ‘national legacy’ and expressed in terms of the nation’s political adversary and cultural obstacle.

The biggest problem facing the first generations of Serbian Yugoslavists was that ‘Byzantium’ never just meant Byzantium. In the Western European and American imaginations, it has always – from Whig historians to post-modernists, from Montesquieu, Voltaire and Gibbon down to John Julius Norwich – been a repository for various Western fantasies about the East. Behind the Gibbon tradition stood a massive body of intellectual habit that (ironically) had its roots in the Greek philosopher Aristotle, but which encompassed not only Montesquieu and Voltaire, but also Machiavelli, Smith, Mill and (sometimes) Marx: the East was a uniformly-benighted backwater, an impersonal faceless horde in slavish submission to debauched despots; against which the virtuous-free-and-republican West could be set in contrast.

Even the earliest, most stridently-Romantic Serbians were sensitive to this body of intellectual habits; and their thought was shaped accordingly. Although the early Serb historiographers accepted the stereotype of a static and despotic Byzantine Empire, the shared religious and cultural heritage of Byzantium and Serbia meant that their criticisms were always reserved and provisional. Not for a Prokić or a Stanojević (both students of Krumbacher; the latter a student of Jireček) the vituperation of Voltaire, to the effect that Byzantium was ‘a worthless repertory of declamations and miracles, a disgrace to the human mind’, much less Hegel’s heckle that it was a ‘disgusting picture of imbecility’! Ignjatović proclaims, rather, that even the earliest Yugoslav Byzantinists were ‘multifaceted’ in their approach.

Indeed, from the Russian Slavophils, the early Serbian Byzantinists inherited a few notes of positive regard for their subject. It was the repository, not of worthless declamations, but the true religious doctrine, beautiful churches, peaceful and contemplative monasteries. It was no disgrace, but instead the careful tender of the fires of Roman and classical Greek civilisations – their literature, their architecture, their visual arts, their philosophy. ‘It presupposed an image that was an antipode to the rationality of the West.’ A certain Romantic view – one to which, having Yugoslav and Czechoslovak heritage myself, I am not entirely immune – of Orthodoxy as a more authentic and purer form of the religion of Christ and His Apostles, was common among these Serbian Byzantinists, along with certain ‘leftist’ political ideals. However, from the Slavophils also came pan-Slavic cultural nationalism, which differentiated the Serbian nation from its Byzantine spiritual foster-mother.

From this complex view of Byzantine history a set of dynamic historiographical threads began to emerge. The South Slavs took the very basis of their religious and cultural distinctiveness from the Byzantines going back to Ss Cyril and Methodius – this was the ‘Byzantinisation thesis’. But they also had to become independent of the Byzantines that had nursed and reared them. Serbian was both enemy and kissing-cousin to Greek, simultaneously both ‘ally and rival’, to use the formula of Jireček. Even as they fought they revealed their ‘indelible’ commonality. The Romantic rubric which was applied to Byzantine studies lent the Serbian national project a kind of stepwise progressivism, particularly as regarded the pivotal political figure of Tsar Stefan Dušan, who was regarded as both an archetypal Byzantine autocrat and a dynamic, vital cultural-political innovator. Among Serbian Byzantinists and mediævalists, Serbia was pronounced a ‘renovator’ of the Byzantine tradition.

It was precisely the kinship of Serbia to Byzantium that gave such a distinct ‘resonance’ to the multi-national project of Yugoslavia. Pace the lazy (but sadly popular) generalisation opposing nationalist Orthodox and cosmopolitan Catholics – precisely these Romantic, Slavophil-influenced Serbian intellectuals were never as deeply seduced by the blood-and-soil rhetoric of exclusive ethnic nationalism as even their close Roman Catholic Croatian cousins were. ‘Serbian élites were frequently trying to substitute a simple concept of an ethnically defined nation-state with a more convenient political entity, based on a multi-national idea.’ The Serbs with their cultural and political development were to be the soft-power nucleus, the ‘attractive core’, that would provide form and legitimacy – even a gospel of liberation – to a pan-Slav state that would gather and unite people of various tribes, languages and creeds. The Eastern Roman Empire, with its clear and careful distinction between ethno-linguistic and political modes of belonging, was the explicit model for the Yugoslav ideal, for such scholars as Ristić, Županič and Cvijić! Even more so than the Czechoslovaks, whose connexion to Byzantium was that much more attenuated and energised by a less well-defined pan-Slavist sentiment, the Serbian Yugoslavists most of all among the South Slavs took to the multi-national creed with the zeal of the newly-converted.

Ignjatović traces out not only how these ideas found their genesis among the intellectual class and among Byzantine scholars, but also how they overlapped with each other. The concept of Yugoslavia was never pure ‘empire’ and never pure ‘nation-state’, but existed in a region of confluence between the two – Ignjatović posits, indeed, that ‘empire’ and ‘nation-state’ exist only as abstract Weberian ideals anyway, and that they are always interwoven to some degree no matter where they are found. He notices parallel trends among Romanian historians (like Nicolae Iorga) and Greek (like Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos) to rebaptise the entire Byzantine legacy in the waters of ethnic nationalist myth-building, to establish links of legitimacy and historical congruity between mediæval and modern political formations, that look all too familiar to students of Rus(sian) history, or observers of current events. The Balkans in general were basically ground zero for the ‘appropriation of Byzantium’ for purposes of nation-building, but the ‘imperial hangover’ of the last nineteenth-century Byzantine symposium is still being felt today. Yugoslavia was formed out of a tension between historical continuity with and rupture from Byzantium, very much as the rest of the post-Ottoman Balkan nations (Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Greece) were.

Still, Yugoslavia more-so than Greece or Romania, both in its monarchical and its Titoist manifestations, possessed a familial resemblance to the Byzantine ideal in its institutional structure. There was the autocracy – the strong power-vertical; there was the multi-ethnic ideal; there was the notion and praxis of philanthrōpia; there was even a new kind of Romanitas. But there was also in Yugoslavia a kind of populism; an œconomic democracy from the ground-up – a hand which Greek-American historian Anthony Kaldellis unfortunately overplays in his treatment of Byzantium, but which was undoubtedly there in limited forms also. This familial resemblance is not accidental. Ignjatović, though he did not necessarily set out to do so, demonstrates convincingly how the intellectual genetics of the Yugoslav political idea – at least among the Serbians who grasped onto it the most intensely in the late nineteenth century – are bound up indelibly with the Byzantine Imperial complex of autocratic, cosmopolitan and populist institutional forms. (In that, he is himself a part, on the ‘critical’ side rather than the Romantic, of the same historiographical project he describes.)

The appeal the memory of Yugoslavia has today is, however, almost entirely anti-imperial. It is a perfectly Grantian ‘intimation of deprival’, yes. It is also a touchstone for non-aligned politics; for mobilisation on behalf of oppressed peoples; for rejection of libertarian and neo-liberal œconomics; for resistance to American hegemonic domination of the globe. In this sense, we could – with a bit of creative anachronism – posit Yugonostalgia as a kind of ‘alter-Byzantinism’. This particular part of the Byzantine legacy, this very human part, needs to be reclaimed by Orthodox Christians who oppose the current technocratic ordo and the looming post-digital idols of a radically-depersonalised future.

Mariological reflections on Pokrov

Today, 1^st October, is both the feast of the Protection of the Mother of God on the Orthodox New Calendar, and the Chinese National Day – the day on which the People’s Republic was officially inaugurated in 1949. This confluence, and the ironically-shared symbolism thereof, is something I’ve commented on before (along with its admittedly-tendentious connexion with the history of the Albazinian community of Orthodox Christians in Beijing). The original protection of the Mother of God at Blachernæ is today more observantly celebrated among the Slavs, who lost that naval battle in the 900s, than among the Greeks who won it. But the Holy Theotokos, in her appearance to the holy fool St Andrew at Blachernæ, showed herself to be covering the whole of the world – the whole oikoumenē – with her maternal love. To be blanketing the world, the way a mother would cradle her baby.

That’s what it’s all about, really. We touched a bit on the Mother of God in our adult education class at St Herman’s this past Sunday on St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (yes, sad to say, that’s me coming in late at 02:50), and we spent a good deal of the time talking about who the Mother of God truly is and what her character is like. First of all, the fact that God Himself – the Being beyond Being, the source of every single thing that is good and true and beautiful – poured Himself out into the creation of the cosmos; and second of all, the fact that the cosmos is observably, ontologically fallen and under the rule of death – these two metaphysical facts seem to tower over everything we do and say and think. The same was true, we must remember, of the Theotokos. The Theotokos was human. Just like every one of us. God loved her, just as He loves every one of us.

I have spoken before about this, but some of the biographical details are worth dwelling on again, just so we can get a clearer picture. After all, the personhood of the Mother of God is central to any Incarnational Christology worthy of the name; just as the womanhood of the Mother of God is central to any Christian appreciation of femininity worthy of the name (though whether we call it feminism may be a matter of some debate).

For the biographical details of Miryam bat-Yahoyaqim (I use the Aramaic rather than the Anglicised spellings here, not to advocate a kind of false Judaïsation, but instead to emphasise the Incarnational particularities of her time and place), we have to turn to the Gospels, and in particular to St Luke, who knew her personally and who was her very dear friend. She is betrothed to an older man of Davidic descent. She is a young girl, a virgin, when she is betrothed to Righteous Yôsep – this we know from multiple of the Gospel accounts. We see from the Gospel of St Luke that she argues with God through Gabriel, but that, at the end of the day, she is perfectly humble, obedient and loving. We see her family: her cousin Elisheva and her unborn baby Yôhanan. We hear her sing a song of praise to God, for which the song of her namesake Miryam the Prophetess in Exodus 15 is the type and prefiguration. We see her giving birth to Christ in the cave outside the inn in Bethlehem, and presenting Him to the expectant Righteous Shim‘ôn at the Temple – who prophesies to her both His glory, and the sorrow that will come to her because of it. In the Gospel of St Mark we see her motherly concern for Christ, when she seeks Him out with His kinsmen as He is healing and preaching in the synagogue. In the Gospel of St John we see her both at the beginning, at the wedding at Cana, and at the end with the Gospel’s author at Christ’s Crucifixion.

From all these accounts, a picture begins to emerge. She is Hebrew. She is not wealthy. She is observant of the rituals. She has an intense life of inward prayer. She is close with her kinswoman. We may imagine in her, without presumption, the ebullient Middle Eastern hospitality still shown by the Syrian and Lebanese Arabs in the Antiochian Church. She is respectful of her elders. But, she has a note of that disputatiousness toward God which is typical of the Jews. She takes a self-effacing rôle in all of the events of the Gospel in which she is most closely concerned. But toward Christ she always, always appears as an attentive, caring, even doting mother – even and especially where she doesn’t entirely understand what her Son is doing. The Gospel accounts are entirely consistent on this last point of her personality. Her self-giving love for God; her love for Christ – these are perfect, ever-consistent, never-failing.

This last point, the sublime love of the Most Holy Theotokos for her Son (and of her Son for His mother), was the one most keenly emphasised by Fr Paul this past Sunday. Even so. What is the meaning of this? Why did God – the First Cause of the entire cosmos, the Unmoved Mover, the One Being beyond all being, the Great ‘I AM’ – single out this particular girl? Why this unassuming, devoted, prayerful, filial and sisterly Jewish teen, among all His creatures? Why, and how, did He – the Most High God who created all things seen and unseen – as Fr Paul says ‘knit Himself into her flesh’, and take from her His own flesh? These questions are unsearchable to human reasoning. Wrangling with the intellectual enormity of the Incarnation is what caused it to be a stumbling-block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. It is, however, the reality that the Apostles bore witness to, that the Church has borne witness to. This is a reality that cannot be explained through intellectual concepts and abstractions. It can only be explained in the same way in which the Theotokos accepted it for herself, in which the Theotokos herself said ‘yes’: in a humble spirit, a spirit of love.

But this ‘yes’, which was given after a bit of argument by – again – this particular Jewish teenager at this particular time and in this particular place: is of supreme importance. It overturns the cosmos. We may say it completely undercuts the concept of earthly time. Saint John the Theologian places Miryam bat-Yahoyaqim at the beginning of his Gospel, at the wedding at Cana – and at the end, at the Crucifixion. Fr Paul puts it thus: ‘[Without the Theotokos], would God have even created the world? No.’ In some mysterious way this one act, this one ‘yes’ of the Theotokos – this love of a human, earthly, flesh-and-blood mother for her equally human and flesh-and-blood (as well as Divine) Son – placed in medias res in fallen time, becomes the single act through which and because of which the whole of the cosmic drama, the whole of the life of the world, from the beginning to the end, can take place. Isn’t this the message Christ Himself proclaimed to Jerusalem – a mother hen gathering all her chicks under her wings?

Perhaps this is the meaning of what Blessed Andrew the Fool-for-Christ saw in his vision at Blachernæ over a thousand years ago. St Epiphanius, in the awe which should overcome any of us, saw the Mother of God covering not just Constantinople, not just the Empire, but the whole of the cosmic order from the beginning to the end, in her protecting love.

Today the faithful celebrate the feast with joy
Illumined by your coming, O Mother of God.
Beholding your pure image we fervently cry to you:
‘Encompass us beneath the precious veil of your protection;
Deliver us from every form of evil by entreating Christ,
Your Son and our God that He may save our souls.’