All Brides Are Beautiful

Peter Cummings and Susan Allis, portrayed by Mark Stevens and Joan Fontaine in 1946 movie adaptation From This Day Forward

At the beginning of this year I expressed my reluctance to post personal things related to my ‘spiritual journey’, on account of the fact that my life has been so heavily fragmented. It took me only half a year to overcome this reluctance and thus ‘out’ myself as a total hypocrite, but I would like to hope that my original essay on fragmentation still has some value. I lived in Pittsburgh as a grad student for two years, but being an Episcopalian at the time, I didn’t start making connexions with the working-class Orthodox history of the city until well after I left. And it was only after I came back to the United States from China that I happened to pick up All Brides Are Beautiful, a novel by first-generation Rusin-American and Braddock, PA native Adalbert Thomas Belejcak – better known by his nom de plume, Thomas Bell. This novel turned out to be a guiding star in more ways than one. I can literally say that it kept me sane in a difficult time of my life.

Set in New York City, All Brides Are Beautiful is a slice-of-life story about a down-on-his-luck machinist, Peter Cummings, and his girlfriend – later wife – Susan Allis, who works as a clerk in an ‘independent’ bookshop. I call it a ‘realist romance’: it follows their courtship and marriage, and contrasts their life with those of their neighbours, the Beasleys, and landlady. It doesn’t shy away from the homely and even ugly details of working-class life in New York City at the tail end of the Great Depression, particularly in its description of their apartment building or the various difficult financial and social circumstances they have to deal with. The realities of debt, rent hikes, quarrels with managers, quarrels with bosses, and most of all unemployment: the challenges facing Peter were in many cases all too real for me – particularly since I was reading this novel when I myself was unemployed. In this passage in particular, Bell spoke both to and for me, with a humble eloquence:

[Peter] learned that to give is not only better than to receive but infinitely easier; and that is bitter knowledge, hardly learned. Against circumstances which made it impossible for him to find work, feel himself a whole man, mere rage was futile; nevertheless he raged. Hunger, even injustice, one could endure, but this piecemeal disintegration of one’s pride, one’s self-assurance, was a slow death. There were times when he found it hard to meet Susan’s eyes.

This book reveals a feminist attitude towards work – somewhat autobiographically (Bell relied on his wife’s work and money and stayed at home while he was unemployed and while he wrote), Peter relies on Susan’s work as a clerk just to (never quite) make ends meet, at least until he lands a job working as a machinist outside the city. The relationship between Peter and Susan itself is playful and teasing and occasionally raunchy, even when the two of them are stressed or angry – but one sees very quickly that a factor that separates Peter from his immediate Beasley neighbours is that he respects Susan. Much of the backdrop which serves to highlight Peter and Susan’s kinda-sorta-functional relationship pertains to the ways in which the Beasleys’ relationships are for the most part falling apart. On the other hand, one of the major plot points involves Susan’s friend Victoria, whose first husband left her alone and pregnant, and who faces a similar situation with her current boyfriend Dan. All the time the reader is led to assume this relationship too will end up badly for Victoria, particularly when she ends up pregnant and seemingly abandoned again, but Bell manages to subvert our expectations with Dan by giving him something of a tragicomic moment toward the end of the book.

Unions and organising are foregrounded as well, and one of the plot points involves Susan’s brother-in-law Hank – who has long been unemployed himself – being offered work crossing picket lines as a scab. Bell portrays Hank’s plight with sympathy, but makes it clear what he believes is the right thing to do: he has Hank come down at last on the side of the striking workers, even though it means staying unemployed and continuing hardships for himself, his wife and his children. Peter (also probably semi-autobiographically on Bell’s part) is also a member of the CPUSA and a subscriber to the Workers’ Daily. American involvement in World War II is looming, which is one of the reasons Peter is able at last to find work. But as he returns from work, he gives internal voice to the following reflections:

To work, to breed, to die; to have in the work little pride, in the breeding little reason for joy, and to die at last like an animal broken with hardship—that was his future, and Susan’s and Martha’s and Hank’s and Victoria’s and Dan’s, the future of the men in this shop and the ordinary men and women of the world. That was their future, for all their dreams. And if they got no worse than a lifetime of labour and insecurity they would be the luckier ones of their kind, for others would starve to death, see their children bloated with malnutrition, made aged dwarfs in mills and factories; work and poverty would rot them with disease, they would be mangled in machines or clubbed and shot on picket-lines; and many would be blown to bits on capitalist battle-fields while safely behind the lines their wives and children had their eyes burned out, their lungs chewed bloody, by the most modern and efficient of poison gasses. For money, for profit and power.

That was their future.

That was what they could expect unless they themselves, the workers, the ordinary men and women of America, ordered it otherwise. Would they realise their own terrible danger, learn to recognise their enemies and their friends, before it was too late? Would they listen, would they believe?

The politics only form a part of this novel’s world, though, which is intensely local. It is a story that seemingly could only take place in New York; the forms of alienation, the openness about sex, the backgrounded racial tensions and portrayals of the wealth gap (the Wall Street set appear briefly and are immediately contrasted with everyone else) would seem wrong set anywhere else. Having been written in the 1940’s, the vernacular feels dated as well as heavily-localised, but it is not inaccessible. Apart from the broader working-class themes and a couple of brief intimations that Peter hails from a recent immigrant family in Appalachia, Bell’s Rusin roots make no appearance at all in this book – those are apparently featured more prominently in his more famous novel (which I haven’t read yet), Out of This Furnace. I still consider this Rusin literature, however, both on account of the fact that it pays such great attention to locality and on account of its stress on class.

Speaking for myself, though, it turned out to be something of an accident that I found work as a machinist (following the family tradition, so to speak) just as I was finishing this book. But somehow I keep finding that these accidents – like my brief career in Pittsburgh and then becoming Orthodox several years later – are never really so accidental as they first appear. Along with the miraculously-sympathetic and -supportive folks at Saint Herman’s, Thomas Bell’s book did help me through a hard time in my career, and for that – even though it is by no means highbrow fiction – it will always have an honoured place on my bookshelf.

Taking religious liberties

Petro Poroshenko (l) and Sam Brownback (r)

It still manages to astound me, even though it shouldn’t. How on earth is Sam Brownback still relevant, at all, after having ruined Kansas with his smash-and-grab tea-party libertarian œconomic policy funded by Koch Industries and given an ‘A’ rating from the Cato Institute, to the point where even the state’s notoriously antidrasticulent Republican establishment gave his agenda the boot? Ah, the wonders of the Trump stamp of approval, which apparently can rehabilitate even the worst of these public thieves, brigands, vandals, thugs and other swamp critters.

Brownback is an utter menace to all notions of good order and good government. After his seven-year ‘grand experiment’ in office, Kansas education benchmarks cratered (particularly for minorities), hospitals had to cut down services under heavy fiscal losses, removed clean water regulations, roads deteriorated (and construction jobs were lost), violent crime skyrocketed, infant mortality climbed, and all he had to show for it was œconomic anæmia and stagnation. There were seven years of famine, alright, but Brownback was no Joseph. The damage to the state from his ideologically-driven gross œconomic mismanagement may in fact take decades to heal. But Brownback has a clear conscience on all of this, even as Trump bailed him out: risibly, he blames falling commodity prices, not his own policies.

He also has a ready bevy of religious enablers willing to offer him absolution: his coalition of Middle American evangelical Protestants and right-wing Americanist Catholics (including our fine friends at the Acton Institute, which has tapped him to speak at their events, and which contributed consultants to his past political campaigns). It’s clear that Trump’s pick of Brownback to his current position, was meant as a sop to his right-wing ‘Christian’ constituency. But, like his benefactor’s, Sam Brownback’s Gospel is not the Gospel of Christ; it is The Fountainhead of Mammon.

So after his stint at successfully systematically demolishing Kansas’s social services and infrastructure, how has Ambassador-at-Large Brownback used his position at the Department of State so far? Well, he’s been sticking his neck out for far-right British republican and white supremacist Tommy Robinson; that’s always a fun ride. He’s trashing China and Myanmar for ostensibly implementing the same kinds of policies toward Muslims he used to pursue at home in Kansas. And most recently he’s been supporting the creation of an ‘independent’ church in the Ukraine.

Well, of course that’s what he’s doing. Of course. Birds of a feather flock together, and the ideology of Poroshenko – that is to say, the ideology of the Maidan protests of 2014 – is perfectly consonant with Brownback’s Tea Party œconomic views. Under the pretext of ‘reform’ and ‘restructuring’, Poroshenko’s government is smashing, grabbing and looting the wealth of the Ukrainian poor just the way Brownback’s did in Kansas of the descendants of a previous generation of Ukrainian poor. It is not, however, consonant with the views of Orthodox Christians worldwide, who may run the gamut from conservative to liberal on social issues, but who are by-and-large happy with an œconomically-interventionist state (also, see my commentary here). The Ukrainian Orthodox Church – that is to say, the canonical one under the preternaturally-patient and long-suffering Metropolitan Onufriy – has been carefully and studiedly neutral on gæopolitical questions, but more unpardonably from the new government’s view has refused to kiss the ring with the wanted abjection.

Brownback might say he’s opening up a ‘spiritual marketplace’ and promoting freedom – but his actual goal is to demoralise, promote schism and foster spiritual confusion among Orthodox Christians. Orthodox Christians in the United States need to understand better, that our true spiritual concept of freedom, articulated best by Metropolitan Saint Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow, is not the same as the libertine œconomic-political concept of licence and cupidity which finds its most radical expression in the libertarian ideology, and which has been weaponised by the American military-industrial apparatus against states which do not bow to its hegemony – including states in majority-Orthodox countries. However much they try to cosy up to us, think tanks like the Acton Institute and associated politicos like Sam Brownback, which promote this libertine concept and use it to attack Orthodox polities both historically and in the present day, are not our friends.

Why the worldview of Patriarch Kirill matters now

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, now Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’

Given the sweep of current events within the Orthodox Church, I’m finding it’s necessary to counter some of the obscene calumnies that have been coming from certain quarters of the religious press with regard to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’. I confess I am not surprised to see these calumnies coming from such a source as Katie Kelaidis, who has a rather prurient obsession with other women’s fashion choices and wants to see racism and subjugation of women lurking around every corner.

Again, you’re welcome to read the whole thing if you’d like; I’ve linked it above. It’s fairly tedious, I warn you. But here are the relevant paragraphs of her shameless screed:

The extent and influence of Kirill’s reactionary socio-political vision should not be underestimated. It’s a deeply anti-Western, anti-democratic, and anti-human rights worldview which has already had a significant effect on Russian domestic policy and has helped garner Russia’s recent prestige among radical conservatives around the world—particularly in the West. The “axis between Russian Orthodox and American Evangelicals,” as the Economist calls it, has been well documented, and, as Slate’s Ruth Graham points out, it’s not a coincidence that Russian spy Maria Butina sought to infiltrate American politics through the religious right.

Patriarch Kirill has described the Putin-era as a “miracle from God” and offered his powerful opposition to pro-democracy protests in Moscow in 2012. He has frequently supported government policy in sermons and on state-run television, positioning Russia in the role of spiritual defender in response to Western objections to Russian human rights policy: “We have been through an epoch of atheism, and we know what it is to live without God. We want to shout to the whole world, ‘Stop!’” His 2011 book, Freedom and Responsibility, posits a contemporary political landscape in which two antagonistic worldviews—one liberal, secular, and humanistic, the other religious and traditional—are engaged in an existential battle.

Leaving aside the various, what can be generously termed lazy factual errors above – for example, that His Holiness Pat. Kirill did not powerfully oppose the pro-democracy protests in 2012 (as reported by the New York Times), and that the political rôle of Ms Butina has been gravely overestimated by prosecutors and investigators (as reported by CNN) – this is an egregious, gross misreading of His Holiness’s politics and theology. It is true that Freedom and Responsibility does posit the antagonism between a globalist liberalism and a the rise of religious reaction; however, what is left out is the key point that Patriarch Kirill advises against siding wholly with one or the other! Kelaidis is counting in bad faith on her readers not to educate themselves by reading what Kirill actually wrote, and instead letting them come to a false conclusion that Kirill is an apocalyptic fundamentalist waging an existential war against ‘human rights’ as such!

If this characterisation were true it would indeed be cause for concern, but it’s not. It is infinitely more instructive for English-speakers not versed in Russian to read the English-language essay he wrote in 1999, ‘Gospel and Culture’. This demonstrates the position which he has held since before he was elected Patriarch by the Synod. Here too, he says:

We have come close to the juncture between two centuries, summing up the one ending and looking with anxiety and hope at the one to come. We look to it with anxiety because we cannot help but see how many unresolved problems humanity faces today, in what a hopeless situation—both spiritual and material—millions of people live. The world is faced, on the one hand, with an aggressive globalising monoculture which tries to impose itself everywhere, dominating and assimilating other cultural and national identities and, on the other, with nationalistic upheavals, tribalisation, and disintegration of the human family. Yet in the midst of contemporary hopelessness and despair, as Christians we live with hope in the eschatological expectation of parousia—the coming of Christ—and Christ’s ultimate triumph over the forces of evil.

Then-Metropolitan Kirill sums up the problems of global Christendom at the end of the twentieth century, including ‘the accumulated arsenal of [nuclear] weapons’, ‘fratricidal wars waged in the former Yugoslavia [and] Chechnya’, ‘the disparity between North and South, the gap between rich and poor’, ‘infant mortality’ and ‘millions infected with HIV/AIDS’ in terms most œcumenists of the day would have agreed with entirely. And he continues as here:

Mission as a witness to the spiritual and ethical heritage of Christianity becomes the number one task for the churches. For fifty years the World Council of Churches has spoken about concrete matters such as overcoming the consequences of the Second World War, liberation from social oppression, disarmament and the elimination of racial discrimination and sexism. We have to acknowledge that it is vital for Christians to address these issues, as they are common concerns for the whole human community.

In this spirit, he goes on to deplore, in the strongest terms, the shameful ways in which Western fundamentalist Protestant missionaries have imposed themselves upon non-Western cultures. His focus in the essay itself is on Russia, but note below how he includes especially those in the global South. He stresses the demands upon the idea of mission, that it is incumbent upon all churches to be respectful of different cultures. This is particularly important given the current crisis in the Ukraine:

To ignore a local church means to break a whole into pieces, to tear the seamless robe of Christ. Missionary efforts from abroad should be made in each place as a support and assistance to the indigenous church or churches… Everyone who, armed with the Bible, sets off to enlighten peoples should remember that by the end of the twentieth century there are indigenous Christian churches virtually everywhere. Independent actions taken by missionary groups at the expense of these churches represent an attempt to redraw the map of the world, and wherever they are taken there is always tension, alienation, bitterness.

The holy martyr Cyprian of Carthage wrote about the church schisms of his time: ‘Who is so impious and perfidious and so infected with the passion for strife that he believes that he can or dare break the unity of God, the robe of the Lord, the church of Christ?’ This question can well be addressed in our day to those who act to the detriment of local churches, tearing the faithful away from the church and thus excommunicating themselves from the world Christian community. St Cyprian made it clear that these people were enemies of the church and Christian faith: ‘What unity is respected, what love is cherished or what love is comtemplated by him who, indulging in strife, cuts the church, ruins faith, disturbs peace, eradicates love, defiles unity? … Indeed, he arms himself against the church and impedes divine construction; he is an enemy of the sanctuary, an agitator against the sacrifice of Christ, a betrayer of the faith and devotion; he is an apostate.’

These words uttered in the third century are still relevant today. At the end of the twentieth century we can state that the work of sectarians and schismatics to destroy the unity of churches continues. And this work is not Christian mission, it is spiritual colonialism. Our urgent task therefore is to get rid of colonial practices and develop a new attitude to mission—or rather, to return to the apostolic and early church understanding of mission not as enslaving or bribing people but rather as liberating and bringing them into the light of Christ’s truth. The twentieth century has been the time of a mass collapse of colonial regimes and the liberation of peoples, nations and regions from foreign domination, from the yoke of foreign cultures. The colonial ideology should be overcome in the realm of church and mission as well. Indeed, for many peoples in the southern hemisphere, Christianisation meant, above all, Europeanisation and destruction of their traditional culture, which the Europeans believed to be low and pagan.

Particularly in the last paragraph, these hardly sound like the words of an apocalyptic fundamentalist, let alone a member of the radical nouvelle-droite as insinuated by Ms Kelaidis. What’s more, Patriarch Kirill’s broad-strokes thesis of Freedom and Responsibility, though updated to include the challenges posed by radical Islamic fundamentalism, does not differ in any substantial respect from Metropolitan Kirill’s views in ‘Gospel and Culture’ – for those who would hold to the notion that his position in the church has corrupted the man and everything he says. In Freedom and Responsibility too, he emphasises the dangers, both to indigenous peoples and to the environment, of both the globalist monoculture and the ‘super-consumerist society’ and the global fundamentalist and nationalist backlash – and suggests charting a different path that avoids the pitfalls of both.

This attack on the head of the Russian Church, from within another branch of the Orthodox Church, is perhaps a kind of projection: the sign of a guilty conscience. After all, in so much of the global South, among the Orthodox Churches it has not been the Russian hierarchs imposing an unwanted ethno-linguistic hegemony over newly-independent post-colonial peoples, but rather the Greek ones – and this has been true in the patriarchates of Jerusalem and Alexandria particularly. Russia’s own history on colonial issues, particularly within Russia’s own historical borders, is sketchy at best; however, particularly in East Asia the Russian Church has walked the walk: they have been steadfastly supportive and respectful of indigenous clergy in ways that the Greek churches have not been, even during traumatic events like the Russo-Japanese War, and even in difficult political situations like that in North Korea.

And with recent events in the Ukraine, the issue of colonial interference and imposition of parallel structures in violation of the dignities of the indigenous church – to wit, the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky) of Kiev, which has been suffering grievously from displacement, violence and land seizures over the past four years – this ill-founded and ill-tempered attack on Patriarch Kirill looks even more so like a classical case of seared conscience.

The worldview of Patriarch Kirill, and deflating the lies and calumnies against it, matter now precisely because they are a key factor in campaigns of collective defamation and the manufacture of consent for war. This is particularly dangerous in an increasingly-unhinged media environment where Russia is already designated as the scapegoat and the external cause of America’s domestic cultural and political problems. I pray that this may soon pass and, now as then, that cooler heads may prevail.

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.