The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: Losing Our Nonfactual Beliefs

"Consider this, consider this the hint of the century..." (REM, "Losing My Religion")

F.A. Hayek (from The Fatal Conceit):

Unlike genetic properties, cultural properties are not transmitted automatically. Transmission and non-transmission from generation to generation are as much positive or negative contributions to a stock of traditions as are any contributions by individuals. Many generations will therefore probably be required to ensure that any such traditions are indeed continued, and that they do indeed eventually spread. Mythical beliefs of some sort may be needed to bring this about, especially where rules of conduct conflicting with instinct are concerned. A merely utilitarian or even functionalist explanation of the different rites or ceremonies will be insufficient, and even implausible.

We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted at least long enough to enable those groups following them to grow, and to have the opportunity to spread by natural or cultural selection. This means that, like it or not, we owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilization that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true - or verifiable or testable - in the same sense as are scientific statements, and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation. I sometimes think that it might be appropriate to call at least some of them, at least as a gesture of appreciation, `symbolic truths', since they did help their adherents to `be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it' (Genesis 1:28).

Even those among us, like myself, who are not prepared to accept the anthropomorphic conception of a personal divinity ought to admit that the premature loss of what we regard as nonfactual beliefs would have deprived mankind of a powerful support in the long development of the extended order that we now enjoy, and that even now the loss of these beliefs, whether true or false, creates great difficulties. In any case, the religious view that morals were determined by processes incomprehensible to us may at any rate be truer (even if not exactly in the way intended) than the rationalist delusion that man, by exercising his intelligence, invented morals that gave him the power to achieve more than he could ever foresee. If we bear these things in mind, we can better understand and appreciate those clerics who are said to have become somewhat skeptical of the validity of some of their teachings and who yet continued to teach them because they feared that a loss of faith would lead to a decline of morals. No doubt they were right; and even an agnostic ought to concede that we owe our morals, and the tradition that has provided not only our civilization but our very lives, to the acceptance of such scientifically unacceptable factual claims.

The undoubted historical connection between religion and the values that have shaped and furthered our civilization, such as the family and private property, does not of course mean that there is any intrinsic connection between religion as such and such values. Among the founders of religions over the last two thousand years, many opposed private property and the family. But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus, the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family (and anti-religion), is not promising. For it is, I believe, itself a religion which had its time, and which is now declining rapidly.

So far as I personally am concerned, I had better state that I feel as little entitled to assert as to deny the existence of what others call God, for I must admit that I just do not know what this word is supposed to mean. I certainly reject every anthropomorphic, personal, or animistic interpretation of the term, interpretations through which many people succeed in giving it a meaning. The conception of a man-like or mindlike acting being appears to me rather the product of an arrogant overestimation of the capacities of a man-like mind. I cannot attach meaning to words that in the structure of my own thinking, or in my picture of the world, have no place that would give them meaning. 

Perhaps what many people mean in speaking of God is just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive. The source of order that religion ascribes to a human-like divinity - the map or guide that will show a part successfully how to move within the whole - we now learn to see to be not outside the physical world but one of its characteristics, one far too complex for any of its parts possibly to form an `image' or `picture' of it. Thus, religious prohibitions against idolatry, against the making of such images, are well taken. Yet perhaps most people can conceive of abstract tradition only as a personal Will. If so, will they not be inclined to find this will in `society' in an age in which more overt supernaturalisms are ruled out as superstitions? On that question may rest the survival of our civilization.

__________________________

F.A. Hayek (1899—1992) was an Austrian economist, social theorist, and political philosopher.   He is best known for his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, in which he argued against the perils of collectivism, and for his opposition to Keynesian economics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.

Kohelet's Anti-Wisdom (Part Two)

{This is the second of my reflections on the scriptural book of Ecclesiastes, widely regarded as the least uplifting book in the Bible.}

"For Kohelet, the sum of all activity, human or natural, was one huge zero." (James Crenshaw)

In the estimate of Biblical scholar James Crenshaw, Ecclesiastes contains five major themes: “Death cancels everything; wisdom cannot achieve its goal; God is unknowable; the world is crooked; pleasure commends itself.” These themes emerge from the author’s profoundly serious quest for meaning, but also from his “loss of trust in the goodness of God.” As Crenshaw notes, “Even Job had secretly harbored a powerful faith that God intended good things for devout people, but Qoheleth [Kohelet] could muster no confidence in God’s disposition to reward virtue and punish vice.” In Job, God refused to justify his ways to man, while in Ecclesiastes man has stopped asking for justification; Kohelet instead looks around at the evidence for a divine plan and finds it lacking.

Nor is it only the human pursuit of happiness or of wisdom that is pointless; the entire created order makes no sense to Kohelet at all. Says Crenshaw: “Humans merely participated in a futile exercise that characterized the universe as well. While generations come and go, the world endures time’s passing, but ceaseless movement of the cosmos succeeds only in going around in a circle. Streams flow to the sea, the sun pants toward its goal, and the wind blows endlessly—yet things remain unchanged. The sum of all activity, human or natural, was one huge zero, the greatest emptiness.”

It has long been claimed that Israel invented—or received as part of its covenant with God—our linear view of history, the idea that history is going somewhere, moving in a particular direction, one predetermined by God. Most ancient cultures held a cyclical view of history: tribes, nations, and empires rose and fell, appeared and vanished, conquered and were conquered, prospered and floundered, flourished and declined. Nothing lasted except the cycle itself. Hebrew scriptures, however, portrayed history as a purposeful narrative, the purpose having been set by God from the very beginning; the human race, and Israel especially, had been singled out for a redemptive task, and in that task was the meaning of history.

Except that Kohelet refused to buy into the narrative. The best thing about life, he proclaimed, was death: “I declared that the dead are happier than the living.” He went further: “Better than both is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.” In this, he echoed the heartfelt lament of Job, “May the day of my birth perish, may it not be included among the days of the year nor be entered in any of the months. Why did I not perish at birth and die as I came from the womb?” Job’s lament came on the heels of catastrophic sufferings inflicted upon him and his family. Kohelet, by contrast, is dispassionate in assessing the human condition; he gives us no reason to think he has suffered unduly (in fact, the text suggests he has done quite well for himself)—rather, he has simply observed the ways of the world and found them wanting. He acknowledges life’s pleasures, and he concedes that worldly wisdom enhances, to some extent, one’s existence; “Wisdom, like an inheritance, is a good thing and benefits those who see the sun. Wisdom brightens a man’s face and changes its hard appearance. Wisdom is a shelter,” he says, “that preserves the life of its possessor”—until, of course, it no longer does. Death claims the wise man as surely as it claims the fool.  “All men,” says Kohelet, “share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifice and those who do not.”

What complicates Ecclesiastes is its ambiguity. Kohelet, “the Teacher,” whoever he was, cannot make up his mind; Walt Whitman-like, he contradicts himself and he contains, if not multitudes, different perspectives. Having said that the dead are happier than the living, he proceeds to say the opposite: “Anyone who is among the living has hope—even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!” What “hope” there is for the living, given that their mortal fate is certain, he does not say; still, he mourns the dead, saying “The dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate, and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun.” Should we, then, envy the dead or should we pity them? Perhaps both, Kohelet suggests, or perhaps neither; but in any case, we should not hasten to join them, because for all we know their situation may be worse than ours.

Life is a bitch and then you die. “Adding one thing to another to discover the scheme of things,” Kohelet relates, “while I was still searching but not finding, I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man’s labor on earth; and I saw that no one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.”

Wisdom, for Kohelet, consists in this: we do not know, and we cannot know. God only knows, and, as Job discovered, God is not inclined to enlighten us. That being the case, Kohelet advises us to “Enjoy life, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days.”

Kohelet must have been a lot of fun at parties.

__________________

James Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom  

The Rise of the "Raskolniki" (Part Five)

{This is the final installment of my foray into the origin of Russian “Old Belief” and into the “Nikonian schism” to which it was a response. If I have not yet made my perspective clear: while I understand the desire to reform the Orthodox Church, my sympathies are with the Old Believers who refused to accept those reforms.}

“Khlysts abjured onions and garlic, for they were thought to mask the odor of sanctity which they detected in one another. They avoided meat because it was the product of copulation. And they avoided the potato, believing it to be the true shape of the fruit with which Eve tempted Adam.” (Jacob Mikanowski)

To recap:

“In 1645, in response to the cries of his children, God descended with his heavenly hosts onto Gorodino hill, Vladimir province, where he took the form of the Kostromo peasant, Danilo Filippov. Hitherto, Filippov had been no more than a runaway soldier; now he was God the Father incarnate. One of his first acts as the deity was to institute the ‘radenie’ (‘striving’), an ecstatic worship service which included song, prayer, dance, and prophecy. In the ‘radenie,’ God directly united himself with his people without the mediation of books or liturgy. He also delivered to them his dodecalogue, which forbade all sexual intercourse, carousing, swearing, drinking, stealing, and attending weddings or baptisms. Finally, he invested his Spirit into his successor, the Murom peasant Ivan Timofeevich Suslov, who became the new Christ.” ¹

The Khlysts (who called themselves “God’s People”) were distinguished, according to J. Eugene Clay, by seven characteristics: their ecstatic form of worship; their strict asceticism; their belief that their founders (Filippov and Suslov) were incarnate deities, rather than prophets; their belief that they were living in the End Times; their communal existence; their adherence, in external aspects, to Orthodoxy (members were even allowed to attend Orthodox services); and the participation of men and women in the sect on an equal basis. ²

That last characteristic fed the inevitable rumors of sexual immorality; the Khlysts, despite their proclaimed asceticism and sexual abstinence, were thought to consummate their ecstatic rituals with debauchery; while they called themselves “God’s People,” the Khlysts were sometimes referred to by others as “the Naked People”. The implicit antinomianism of most Old Believer sects, and the secrecy of Khlysty worship, led outsiders to assume the worst: like the first Christians, the Khlysts were suspected not just of orgies but of ritual infanticide (the same “blood libel” that was turned against the Jews).

Jacob Mikanowski describes a somewhat tamer reality:

The core of the Khlysts’ religious practice was about a conscious pursuit of ecstasy. Their ‘radenie’ [the word means “zeal,” but also suggests “joy”] were typically conducted at night, in a cottage far removed from neighbors. Here, the Khlysts sought God in dance. In ones or twos, they spun like dervishes, twirling until the candles in the hut blew out and they collapsed exhausted, drenched in sweat.  Sometimes they would gather in larger numbers for ‘round,’ a dance in a ring around a vat of water. As they danced, the Khlysts spun in a circle and flagellated themselves. Suddenly, a whirl would appear in the water, a sign that the Holy Spirit had appeared. Sometimes the water would boil and bubble, and the baby Jesus would appear in the steam. Then the Khlysts would take the water home and consume it, getting “drunk” on what they called “spiritual beer.” ³

The absence of debauchery and infanticide does not make the radenie any less strange to the modern mind. As Mikanowski says, “Their practices might seem grotesque or obscene. But they carry a lesson, of how hard it is to square belief with life and how much we might need to give up if we want to make life paradise.”

Taking the Khylsts at their word regarding sexual abstinence: such discipline was either too difficult or not severe enough for a related/rival group, the Skopts, who believed that “the way to holiness lay in extreme renunciation: not just of sex, but of the very organs that mark sexual difference.” The Skopts followed the example of Origen, an early Christian theologian who took literally Jesus’ words that “there are those who become eunuchs for the kingdom of God”. Origen castrated himself, and what was good enough for Origen was good enough for the Skopts. 

Jacob Mikanowski links such zeal to that of the 20^th-century Bolsheviks:

They make a strange pair: the hardened Bolshevik, using terror to usher in modernity, and the archaic-seeming sect mutilating their bodies to remove the taint of original sin. In their own way, the Skopts had embarked on a social experiment no less radical than that of the revolutionaries. In pursuing castration, they removed the great stumbling block to utopia: desire. After all, what makes us more selfish than love? The Skopts redirected the passion reserved for children and lovers to the community as a whole — they lived in communes, not families, and held property in common. Their kin were determined by belief, not blood. In other places and times, this would be known as communism.

In his reference to Russia’s chronic “metaphysical hysteria” brought about by what he called the “Khlysty element” in the national psyche, Nicolai Berdyaev made the same connection; “Bolshevism,” he wrote, “is a new form of the age-old Russian Khlystyism. This Khlystyism can be both black and red; the Khlysty-like hero can just as easily be either Rasputin or Lenin.”

Old Belief, in its milder forms, was not limited to the peasantry; it attracted landowners and merchants as well, some of whom were, or became, quite wealthy. Old Believers became an influential part of Russian society in the 18^th, 19^th, and early 20^th centuries. They asserted themselves in local political affairs; as early as 1682, when the movement was still new, they even played a role in the Moscow Strel’tsy uprising, part of a battle over dynastic succession. Long after Peter the Great’s 18^th-century pivot toward the West, as Russians struggled with the issue of “Westernizing” and modernizing the nation, Old Believers were outspoken in their resistance to Western influence; the 19^th-century Slavophiles in many ways carried the banner of Old Belief into the cultural fray.  

Old Belief groups persist to this day, in Russia and elsewhere. Some of the groups emigrated to North America (western Canada, in particular); others scattered to the Russian frontiers and into neighboring countries. So far as we know, neither the Khlysts nor the Skopts have survived—the usual fate of religious sectarians who, like the Gnostics, seek to escape the cycle of birth and death by refusing to reproduce.

I give the last words about the Khlysts to Jacob Mikanowski:

Music was a mainstay of Khlyst worship. They had a gift for composing hymns. According to a Khlyst saying, “A song (pesenka) is a ladder (lesenka) to God.” Their music was strange and haunting. It had something in common with the music of American Shakers and shape-note singers. Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, an English scholar of religion, wrote of once seeing a group of them in procession on the solitary plains between Yerevan and Mt. Ararat. He called it ‘the most stirring devotional music I have ever listened to,’ adding ‘No one who has encountered them will forget their deep-set intensely gleaming eyes, their spare emaciated frames, their reposeful manner. They seem to have dropped out of another world into this one.’

Across the centuries, the Khlysts and Skopts ask, is it better to live for joy or purpose? Dance, make love, get drunk on the joy of the body say the Khlysts, to the sound of whips. Mortify the flesh, punish the body, and be free, say the Skopts, to the sound of bells.

____________________

¹ J. Eugene Clay, God's People in the Early Eighteenth Century. The Uglich Affair of 1717 on JSTOR

² We should add to these characteristics two others previously mentioned: their vow of secrecy and their willingness to lie to outsiders.

³ For what it is worth: Vladimir Lenin used that very phrase, “spiritual beer,” to scoff at the idea of religion.  

The Rise of the "Raskolniki" (Part Four)

{In which the godhead reveals itself in the village of Gorodina, miracles subsequently abound, and the Khlysts appear on the scene...}

“In the Russian people there is a very peculiar element, the Khlysty element, upon which has developed a metaphysical hysteria in the character of the Russian people.” (Nicolai Berdyaev) ¹

Speaking of metaphysical hysteria: according to Robert Crummey, “In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the cultural atmosphere of Russia was charged with tension born of apocalyptic expectations.” The Time of Troubles (1598-1613) had set the stage for those expectations; even before Patriarch Nikon’s reforms, spiritual unrest was percolating throughout Russia. The educated classes eagerly read the ‘Kniga o vere,’  which was “a collection of apocalyptic writings of Ukrainian origin,” while the peasants were briefly captivated by a hermit named Kapiton who taught that the world, currently ruled by Antichrist, was about to end. ² More impressively, in 1645, before Nikon had come to Moscow, a peasant by the name of Danila Filippovich, wandering in the province of Vladimir, had an epiphany: 

One day in 1645, on a hill in village of Gorodina in the Province of Vladimir, the godhead descended upon Danila in his fiery cart, trailed by angels and seraphim. Henceforth, Danila regarded himself the Living God. He issued commandments like Moses on Mt. Sinai. He announced that there was no teaching but his. From now on, the only book that mattered was the “dove-like” book written in the heart by the Holy Spirit. To prove his point, he took all the books he owned, put them in a sack, and threw them in the Volga River. [Jacob Mikanowski]

We will return to Danila shortly. First, let us remember that the unrest at that time was not only spiritual; in Crummey’s telling:

“The mid-seventeenth century was a time of sharp social tension: the service nobility and the more prosperous townsmen flooded the government with complaints about the inequity of their lot. The peasants and the poorer townspeople expressed their grievances no less eloquently in periodic uprisings. The mood of frustration and fear was undoubtedly intensified by the epidemic of plague which swept Moscow in 1654. In such a climate, reforms of the liturgical practices of the Russian church was an explosive undertaking.”

Predictably, Nikon’s actions produced equal and opposite reactions; the raskol, when it finally occurred in the 1660s, was every bit as explosive as the reforms that triggered it. Robert Crummey explains:  

The defense of the old Orthodox ritual became the defense of Russia’s history. As western influence continued to grow, it became a defense of native cultural traditions as well. For some Old Believers, the introduction of the reformed ritual was the last straw, while for others social grievances were the spur to revolt. Old Belief, after 1667, was an indistinguishable blend of opposition to the liturgical reforms, foreign cultural influence, bureaucratic centralism, and social injustice. Antichrist was a symbol of all that was new and offensive in Muscovite society.

Crummey also notes how, removed from the discipline of the official Church, Old Belief contained multitudes:

Once Old Believers broke away from the official church, they began to search for suitable norms of ritual practice and ecclesiastical discipline. The movement split into a multitude of sects and took on a distinct regional coloration: it found especially fertile soil in the popular psychology and political and social conditions of particular regions, often those located on the frontiers of the Russian empire. With no bishops of their own to lead them, these sects had to search for other sources of ecclesiastical authority. Each believer became his own priest, in fact if not in theory, and each man’s train of thought might lead him to his own special conclusions.

Which brings us back to Danila Filippovitch, who, following his epiphany of 645, had continued his wandering and his preaching, and whose further adventures Jacob Mikanowski relates in splendid detail:

After fifteen years of wandering, Danila came across a spiritual son in the manner of St. Paul. His name was Ivan Suslov. According to legend, his parents were both a hundred years old when he was born, and they were so poor they used a broken pig trough for a cradle. When Suslov was thirty-three, he met Danila, who named him his Jesus Christ. Ivan worked miracles. Twice he was crucified, and twice he rose from the dead. The second time he was also flayed, on the order of the czar. When he returned to earth a young girl covered him in a sheet which stuck fast and became a second skin. He levitated, and he flew. With Danila, he visited heaven three nights in a row. He was buried in the village of Kriushino in the province of Kostroma.

Thus was born the sect known as the Khlysts ³ (related to the word for “Christ-believers” but also meaning “whips”— members practiced flagellation):

Suslov and Filippovich gathered many followers. After their deaths (or, ascensions) those followers recruited followers of their own. The Khlysts believed that Jesus was born like any other man. He was no different from other men until the age of thirty, when the Holy Spirit anointed him and made him God’s son. And if the Holy Spirit could enter one man, it could enter others as well, even women. It stood to reason then that there could be many Christs, and many Mothers of God. The Khlysts’ aim was to bridge the world of the supernatural and the present, to merge divine time with our own, but hardly any of them would admit to it in public; the Khlysts kept the true nature of their beliefs hidden from the profane. Novices, upon being accepted into the sect after long trials, had to take a special oath: “I vow to keep secret all that I shall see and hear at meetings, never sparing myself, never fearing the knout, the stake, the sword or any other torment!” 

The Khlysts believed that lying was a sin, but only when the lie was committed before God. To conceal themselves from persecution, they became masters of dissembling. When missionaries denounced the Khlysts to their face, they acted horrified that anyone could believe such horrible untruths. When priests asked, “Have you sinned?” the Khlysts would reply: “I am guilty before you, Father.” When the priests gave them wine to drink at Mass, they would keep it in their mouths and wait until the service was over to spit it out.

As with the raskol itself, there would be nothing easier than to mock the Khlysts, but, to his credit, Mikanowski takes them seriously: “In their rituals and beliefs, the Khlysts tried to solve an old puzzle: How to live in a world without God, where holiness is missing and even his prophets are silent or far away? Their answer was to pursue ecstasy, everywhere, even at pain of death.” ⁴

In the first century CE, Jesus told his followers that he would return to them soon; he said that many of them would live to witness the coming of God’s kingdom. Shortly thereafter, Paul insisted, “The night is far gone, and the day is almost here.” Sixteen hundred years later, Russian peasants raised on such eschatological promises looked around them and saw nothing resembling God’s kingdom; can we blame them for seeking it in their own (sometimes eccentric and sometimes perverse) rituals?  

____________________________

Jacob Mikanowski’s full article can be found here: The Wheel And The Knife - The Awl

¹ Berdyaev’s exegesis of the “Khlysty element” concludes that Russians have failed to properly the masculine and feminine aspects of their nature:

The Khlysty element is bound up with an incorrect and impaired interrelationship of the masculine and feminine principles in the soul and the character of the Russian people. Within the mystical depths of the Russian people there has not occurred as it were a marital consummation, a true union of the masculine and feminine principles within the people's character. The soul of the people remains feminine, separated from the masculine principle, eternally awaiting a bridegroom and eternally not accepting any as her destined one.

Berdyaev, it should be noted, was given to overthinking things.

² "Antichrist" would be used by Old Believers as a catch-all term for all the evil in the world. It could refer to the Orthodox hierarchy, or to the tsar himself, or to a peddler who sold you defective merchandise; centuries later, it would be applied by some to a dissolute, disreputable Siberian monk named Rasputin.  

³ I will say this only one time: Dani & the Khlysts is a great name for a band.

⁴ "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of ecstasy"? It sounds like a slogan Abbie Hoffman dreamed up.

The Rise of the "Raskolniki" (Part Three)

{Reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century provoked widespread resistance and led to an informal schism ("raskol") and to the creation of numerous sects of what were called "Old Believers" (or "raskolniki," "schism-makers"). The importance that Russian Christians attached to their traditional forms of worship may be hard for us to understand, but their devotion and their sincerity cannot be questioned.} 

“Russian believers saw patriarch Nikon not as the representative of the Orthodox Church but of the Greek faith. The true Orthodoxy however was the Russian, not the Greek faith. The extreme Russian traditionalism broke de facto with the older Greek Church. On this basis developed the schisms of the Old Ritualists and the Old Believers.” (Nicolai Berdyaev)

Despite the resentment caused by his reforms, Patriarch Nikon’s star continued to rise. Tsar Alexis granted him unprecedented ecclesiastical authority; more than that, when Alexis embarked on a military campaign against the Polish-Lithuanian forces in 1654, he put Nikon in charge in his absence. Not surprisingly, Nikon quickly began to exceed his authority; he wanted to reverse portions of the Sobornoye Ulozheniye of 1649, promulgated by Alexis himself, which had made the Orthodox Church more subservient to the state (and subject to taxation). Nikon believed firmly in the separation of Church and state, and he believed the Church should be led by a patriarch with unbound ecclesiastical authority—an Orthodox tsar, essentially.

Tsar Alexis returned from his war and scotched Nikon’s attempted changes. In 1658, Nikon took a voluntary leave of absence, retaining his title of Patriarch but leaving Moscow to live at the New Jerusalem Monastery west of the capitol. In 1660, a synod (council) of Russian Orthodox prelates attempted to elect a new patriarch and to review the Nikonian reforms, but were unable to do either.

Finally, in 1666 (an ominous number), more than a decade after Patriarch Nikon initiated his controversial reforms, Tsar Alexis convened a synod in Moscow to deal with the fuss that had ensued. The synod was to be a ‘pan-Orthodox’ council, not limited to Russian prelates; Church patriarchs (or their representatives) arrived from Greece, Syria, and Jerusalem, among other places. Tasked with calming the troubled waters of Russian Orthodoxy, the Great Moscow Synod, as it came to be called, proceeded to make matters worse. While it disposed of the beleaguered Patriarch Nikon, finding him guilty, among other things, of “reviling the tsar” and of “beating and torturing his spiritual dependents,” ¹ it effectively ratified his hated reforms:

The council condemned as heretical the famous Stoglav of 1551 (a collection of Russian Orthodox ecclesiastical regulations) because it had dogmatized the native Russian church rituals and usage at the expense of those accepted in Greece and other Orthodox countries. This decision precipitated a great schism, or raskol, of the Russian Orthodox Church. Leading Old Believers were brought to the synod from their prisons (to which they had been sent by Nikon). Since they refused to revise their views, the Old Believer priests were defrocked, anathematized, and sentenced to life imprisonment in distant monasteries.

Nikon’s “punishment” was to be removed as patriarch, stripped of his sacerdotal privileges, and exiled to a remote Siberian monastery to live as a simple monk—which was exactly what Nikon had wanted before being pressured to accept the position in Moscow.   

The Great Moscow Synod was in session for approximately nine months. Its singular “achievement” was to turn the anger of Russian Christians, which had until then been directed against Nikon, toward the Russian Orthodox Church itself. Worse, because the Church was, and had long been, tightly connected to the tsarist State, and because it was Tsar Alexis whose synod had ratified Nikon’s reforms, the anger was also turned against the Russian government. Consequently, the raskol came to include political dissidents as well as religious traditionalists, which made it more dangerous and, accordingly, increased the authorities’ determination to suppress it.

In short, following the synod, and despite Nikon’s removal, all hell broke loose.  

A Moscow priest named Avvakum Petrov was a prominent, and vocal, opponent of the reforms. He had been repeatedly imprisoned and exiled during Nikon’s tenure; he was allowed to return to Moscow in 1666 for the synod, but when he continued to speak out against the synod’s decisions he was exiled again in 1667 to Pustozyorsk, a remote outpost above the Arctic Circle, where, sources tell us, “he was imprisoned for the last fourteen years of his life in a dugout (a sunken log-framed hut). He was executed in 1682 by being burned at the stake.”

Getting rid of Avvakum accomplished nothing; he was far from alone in his opposition to Nikon and to the synod. Resistance was too widespread, and it tapped into too many veins of discontent:

The case brought by the defenders of the old faith found many supporters among different strata of the Russian society. A part of the old faith low-ranking clergy protested against the increase of feudal oppression from the church leaders. Some members of the high-ranking clergy joined the Raskol movement due to their discontent over Nikon's aspirations and the arbitrariness of his church reforms. Some, such as Bishop Paul of Kolomna and Archbishop Alexander of Vyatka, stood up for the old faith; Bishop Paul was eventually executed for his loyalty to the old rites. Feodosiya Morozova, her sister Princess Urusova, and some other courtiers openly supported or secretly sympathized with the defenders of the old faith.

The unification of such heterogeneous forces against what had become "the official church" could probably be explained by the somewhat contradictory ideology of the Raskol movement. A certain idealization and conservation of traditional values and old traditions, a critical attitude towards innovations, conservation of national originality and acceptance (by radical elements) of martyrdom in the name of the old faith as the only way towards salvation were intertwined with criticism of feudalism and serfdom. Different social strata were attracted to different sides of this ideology.

A subterranean layer of grievances surfaced and coalesced within the Old Believer ranks. As is often the case, persecution failed to extinguish the flame of rebellion; if anything, it fanned that flame. Robert Crummey explains how the government’s response to Old Belief backfired:

The opponents of Nikon’s liturgical reforms and the disaffected who flocked to their banners  had no specific platform and no clear vision of the kind of society to which they aspired. As the years passed, it was the imperial government which, by the executioner’s sword and the bureaucrat’s pen, applied specific pressures to the Old Believers and elicited from them the specific responses which formed the foundation of their political theory and practice, their internal organization, and their economic practices. To a considerable degree, the imperial government was the unwitting creator of the institutions and attitudes of Old Belief.

Clergy and laity alike joined the resistance, which spawned some horrifyingly apocalyptic acts:

Members of the low-ranking clergy, who had severed their relations with the church, became the leaders of the opposition. Preservation of the Orthodox faith as it had existed until the reforms was the main postulate of their ideology. The most dramatic manifestations of Old Belief included the practice of the so-called “baptism by fire,” or self-immolation, practiced by the most radical elements in the Old Believers' movement, who thought that the end of the world was near.

Predictably, Old Belief spun off in myriad directions:

The Old Believers would soon split into different denominations. Attracted to the preachings of the Raskol ideologists, many peasants, craftsmen, and Cossacks fled to the dense forests of Northern Russia and the Volga region, to the southern borders of Russia, to Siberia, and even abroad, where they would organize their own communities. This was a mass exodus of common Russian people who refused to follow the new ecclesiastic rituals. In 1681, the government noted an increase among the "enemies of the church", especially in Siberia. With active support from the Russian Orthodox Church, it began to persecute the so-called raskolniki ("schism-makers"). 

Dissent, persecution, martyrdom, sectarianism, and raskol; on and on the parties contended, but, in the end, to quote Mikhail Epstein, “No one’s mind was changed.” That does not mean, though, that the raskol did not produce some noteworthy religious phenomena, to one of which I will next turn my attention.

__________________________

Sources

Great Moscow Synod - Wikipedia

Raskol - Wikipedia

Avvakum - Wikipedia

Patriarch Nikon of Moscow - Wikipedia

Robert Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist

¹ It is not known whether Patriarch Nikon employed the famous “Costanza Defense”: “Beating and torturing—was that wrong? I mean, is that against Church policy? I'll be honest, I don’t recall that coming up at the interview…”

The Rise of the "Raskolniki" (Part Two)

{In which we see how the 17th-century reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church were met with resistance, which led to the departure of millions of the faithful from the Church fold.}   

“Misery pursued Nikon from his cradle, and prematurely hardened a character not naturally soft.”

The central figure in the 17^th-century Russian Orthodox schism was Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, who, in a different time and place, likely would have been celebrated as an energetic, albeit imperious and heavy-handed, reformer. His intentions were no doubt benign, but his methods left something to be desired. 

Nikon was born "Nikita Minin"; he came from peasant stock, was mostly self-educated, and had run away from home to escape an abusive stepmother. He made his way through seminary and became a parish priest; he married and fathered three children, all of whom died tragically young. Before being named Patriarch of Moscow, he had been a monk (the occasion for which he took the name "Nikon"), a prior at a monastery, an archimandrite, and a metropolitan of the church in Novgorod, where he attracted both praise and criticism (he was once beaten by an angry mob) for his administrative style. In 1649, he had joined a Moscow group called the “Zealots of Piety,” founded in 1646, whose mission was “to revitalize the parishes through effective preaching, the orderly celebration of the liturgy, and enforcement of the church's moral teachings. To ensure that the liturgy was celebrated correctly, its original and authentic form had to be established.” That latter task would prove to be easier said than done.

The nation was still emerging from what is called “The Time of Troubles,” a fifteen-year span of political and social turmoil (1598-1613) that marked the transition from the old tsarist dynasty (the Ruriks) to the new (the Romanovs). That era saw a widespread collapse of law and order; a famine (1601-03) that killed one-third of the population; military occupation by Polish troops; war with Sweden; and a bloody struggle for the throne between various imposters and usurpers; until sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov was elected tsar by the Zemsty Sobor (a convocation of Russian nobility), executed his remaining rivals (one of whom was three years old), and restored order.

That “order” was codified thirty-five years later, in 1649, by Tsar Alexis, who promulgated a new law code, the Sobornoye Ulozheniye. Among other things, this code “completed the enserfment of the Russian peasantry and bound urban taxpayers to the town in which they were legally registered.” A passport was required for domestic travel. Russian nobility was allowed the privilege of owning serfs (formerly, all serfs had been the property of the State) but in return was required to serve in the military. The code included a new category of “political crimes,” intended to suppress dissent and to solidify autocratic rule over the country.  

Whatever the shortcomings and specifics of the Sobornoye Ulozheniye, it represented an effort to modernize and to clarify the Russian legal code, eliminating inconsistencies in the law and expunging obsolete regulations. As such, it served as an example of what Russian Orthodox officials wanted done with canon law. Many Russians believed that the Time of Troubles had stemmed from the Russian people’s lack of piety, which had brought upon them God’s wrath; religious reform and renewal were therefore needed to avert future calamities. 

In 1652, having impressed his Zealot colleagues and having drawn the attention of Tsar Alexis, Nikon was asked to move from Novgorod to Moscow, to assume the role of patriarch, and to oversee whatever ecclesiastical, liturgical, and devotional changes were to be made. Nikon, however, had already tired of administrative duties; a spiritual man at heart, he asked permission to retire to a monastery and to live as a simple monk. Three times Nikon balked at the assignment to the  patriarchy, but his superiors insisted. Once in Moscow, however reluctantly, Nikon dutifully took charge.

Authorized to harmonize Russian Orthodox liturgical practices with those of the Greek Orthodox Church, to clarify doctrinal or theological ambiguities in the liturgical texts, and to recover, as far as possible, the form, the language, and the spirit of earliest Christian worship: Nikon had his work cut out for him. Encountering resistance from traditionalists, and impatient with the conflicting opinions he received from reformers, Nikon chose to consult non-Russian scholars rather than his Russian colleagues or the Russian laity. That choice undermined his efforts from the outset:  

Nikon launched bold reforms. He consulted the most learned of the Greek prelates abroad and invited them to a consultation at Moscow; the scholars of Constantinople and Kiev convinced Nikon that the Muscovite service-books were heterodox, and that the icons in use had very widely departed from the ancient Constantinopolitan models.

Nikon harshly criticized the use of such new-fangled icons; he ordered a house-to-house search for them to be made. His soldiers and servants were ordered first to gouge out the eyes of these heretical counterfeits and then to carry them through the town in derision. He also issued an ukase threatening with the severest penalties all who dared to make or use such icons in the future.

Not content with maiming and ridiculing icons, Patriarch Nikon took a wrecking ball to church buildings:

Construction of tented-roof churches was strictly forbidden ¹, and many old uncanonical churches were demolished to make way for new ones, designed in the "Old Byzantine" style. This ruthlessness goes far to explain the unappeasable hatred with which the Old Believers, as they now began to be called, ever afterwards regarded Nikon and all his works.

There were liturgical and ritual changes:

In 1652, Nikon convened a synod and instructed the clergy to compare Russian liturgical books with their Greek counterparts. Monasteries from all over Russia received requests to send examples to Moscow to have them subjected to a comparative analysis. Such a task would have taken many years of conscientious research and could hardly have given an unambiguous result, given the complex development of the texts over the previous centuries.

Nikon had no intention of waiting years, much less of tolerating textual ambiguity:

Without waiting for the completion of any comparative analysis, Nikon overrode the decrees of the Synod and ordered the printing of new editions of the Russian psalter and missal, as well as a pamphlet justifying his liturgical changes. The new psalter and missal altered the most frequently used words and visible gestures in the liturgy, including the pronunciation of Christ's name. Changes were often made arbitrarily.

Confusion immediately reigned. Nikon’s assistants had hastily and haphazardly attempted to comply with his instructions; on close inspection, there seemed to be little rhyme or reason to their methodology. In some texts, for instance, they substituted the designation “Christ” for the phrase “the Son” and the word “Church” for the word “Temple”; in other texts, however, they did the reverse.  

Nikon had to be prepared for opposition. When it arose, he dealt with it summarily, which only made the situation worse:

“The overbearing manner in which he forced the changes through turned many of his colleagues against him. Nikon's patriarchal staff descended with crushing force upon those with whom he disagreed. Protests led to excommunication and exile and, in some cases, to imprisonment or execution.” ²

To ordinary believers, versed neither in liturgical studies, textual analysis, nor ecclesiastic politics, the changes were both bewildering and offensive. The most notable innovations included:

• A change to the spelling of the name “Jesus”
• A change to the wording of one article of the creed (the word “True” was deleted from the phrase “one True Lord”)
• A change to how the sign of the cross was made—rather than being made with two fingers, it would now be made with two fingers and the thumb
• A third alleluia was added to the traditional “Alleluia, alleluia, glory to Thee, o God”
• The traditional direction of ritual procession was reversed—whereas it formerly had been done clockwise, it was now to be done counterclockwise.

It is easy now to scoff at the heated reaction to what might seem trivial details. However, “The faithful of that time saw rituals and dogmas as strongly interconnected: church rituals had from the very beginning represented and symbolized doctrinal truth.” Moreover, Church authorities had always emphasized the unchanging nature of the Christian faith as a sign of its truth; believers had always found comfort in the constancy of rituals, prayers, feast days, etc. Nikon’s changes undermined all that:

“The book revision by Nikon, owing to its speed, its range, its foreignness of sources and its offending character was bound to provoke protest, given the seriously assimilated, not only national but also the genuine orthodox identity of the Russian people. The protest was indeed global: the episcopate, the clergy, both regular and monastic, the laity and the ordinary people.”

Other than that, everyone was happy.

______________________________

Patriarch Nikon of Moscow - Wikipedia

Old Believers - Wikipedia

Time of Troubles - Wikipedia

¹ Who in their right mind would forbid constructing a "tented-roof" church that looked like this?

² We should note that Nikon’s reforms happened to coincide with a plague in Moscow in 1654, which would have been interpreted as, at the very least, an inauspicious omen.  

The Rise of the "Raskolniki" (Part One)

{Note: my latest serial venture into Russian history is about the schism, or ‘raskol,’ that took place in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17^th century, and on the "raskolniki" ("schismatics")--various sectarians and religious dissenters--who emerged from it. Today’s post is by way of providing some background.}   

Russian religious history is every bit as fascinating as you might expect.

In the 10^th century CE, Prince Vladimir of Novgorod emerged victorious from a dynastic squabble and became the ruler of the territory of Kievan Rus’ (modern Ukraine, Belarus, and the western region of Russia). A capable sovereign, Vladimir consolidated and expanded the borders of Kievan Rus’. Having secured his territory from external threats, Vladimir decided that having an official religion would help bring about internal cohesion. He therefore dispatched several of his ministers to neighboring countries to determine which of the various religions was best and most fitting for the people of Rus’.

According to historian George Fedotov:

Prince Vladimir sent his envoys to the centers of different confessions, Muslim, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox, to investigate whose faith was the best. The envoys performed their task in the only manner available to them—be observing the liturgical rites of the respective nations. They were deeply disgusted by the Jewish and Muslim worship and not affected by that of the Catholics, but their enthusiasm for the Greek service was immense.

In Constantinople, the Emperor sent them to a solemn celebration in Saint Sophia, organized especially for their benefit. They hardly could understand the words of the Greek liturgy or its religious meaning, but its beauty was the decisive factor in their final choice. They reported to Vladimir in the following words:

“We went on to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifice where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty and we are at a loss to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty. Every man, after tasting something sweet is afterwards unwilling to taste that which is better.”

Fedotov adds, “Certainly this is no more than a legend,” but it was a legend crafted to serve a purpose and to illustrate a truth; “the appreciation of the aesthetic side of worship remains one of the most constant features of Russian religion.”

Whether from religious conviction or for reasons of state, Prince Vladimir himself converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988 CE. Nicolas Zernov believes this to have been a fateful decision: “By choosing Eastern Orthodoxy—rather than Roman Christianity or Islam—Vladimir cut Russia off from both her neighbors and thus provoked their lasting hostility.” Vladimir’s choice took on additional importance in the middle of the following century (1054 CE) when Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodox Christianity officially parted ways (the “Great Schism”) over doctrinal differences and, crucially, over the authority of the Bishop of Rome.

Vladimir’s conversion and the subsequent Great Schism created a new hybrid: Greek Orthodoxy with a distinctively Kievan Rus’ flavor, including (as Christianity did elsewhere) indigenous pre-Christian superstitions and pagan practices. The situation is described by Nicolas Zernov:

The Russians found themselves in circumstances never repeated in Europe. They were able to create their own culture on a Christian basis, outside the boundaries of classical civilization, and they remained uninfluenced by Imperial Rome. The vast spaces of their own country, the talents of its people, and their firm belief in their special calling provided the Russians with the necessary strength and confidence for their ambitious enterprise of building a Christian realm which should surpass Rome and Constantinople in its faithfulness to Christ and its zeal to apply His precepts to daily life…there is no doubt that [Russians] had a genuine conviction of the reality of their mission, and that they produced a social order which was an integral embodiment of their religious outlook.

The Christianized lands of Kievan Rus’ prospered under the Rurik dynasty, minding their own business (more or less), until the 13^th century, at which time they were engulfed by invaders from the east. A contemporary (1346 CE) account describes the event:

“The Mongols attacked Rus', where they made great havoc, destroying cities and fortresses and slaughtering men; and they laid siege to Kiev, the capital of Rus'; after they had besieged the city for a long time, they took it and put the inhabitants to death. When we were journeying through that land, we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground. Kiev had been a very large and thickly populated town, but now it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce two hundred houses there and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery.”

What followed was two hundred years of subjugation, but the inhabitants of Kievan Rus’ were fortunate in one respect: the Mongols were content to be absentee landlords, withdrawing from, rather than occupying (or razing), the conquered territory—as long as the various princes of the Kievan Rus’ provinces paid tribute. On the other hand, Mongol domination stunted the development of native Russian culture and social institutions, as Frederick Copleston explains:

The natural development of early Russia was arrested in the thirteenth century. While western Europe was constructing the civilization of the Middle Ages with its educational and intellectual life, Russia was subjected to the Mongol, or Tartar, yoke and was in no position to develop its culture. The long period [200 years] of Mongol domination was for Russia a period of cultural stagnation and, in some respects, decline. What with internal squabbles, incursions from the West and the need to meet Mongol demands for tribute, Russia’s cultural life declined rather than developed. When she finally succeeded in throwing off the Mongol yoke, she was far behind western Europe in the level of intellectual life. Russia experienced nothing comparable either to the intense study and appropriation of ancient philosophy which was characteristic of the medieval universities in western Christendom, nor did she share in the subsequent ferment of the Renaissance.

Even under Mongol rule, however the Rus’ held onto their religion, devotion to which intensified; Russian Orthodoxy became more and more integral to the nation’s identity. For two hundred years, Kievan Rus’ provinces were kept divided and played off against each other by the Mongols; but in 1480, Kievan Rus’ forces, united under the leadership of Prince Ivan of Muscovy, finally shook off the Tartar yoke. Ivan became emperor, or tsar, and Muscovy (Moscow) became the capitol of what was no longer Kievan Rus’ but Russia.

In the wake of that triumph, and since Byzantium had fallen to Islamic forces in 1453, the newly independent Russians believed that the torch of Orthodox Christian leadership had passed to them. As Nicolai Berdyaev wrote:

After the fall of Byzantium [in 1453], the Russian people felt itself the only representative of Christian orthodoxy. On this basis developed the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome. People began to call the Orthodox faith "Russian Orthodox" and to identify the universal Church with the Russian. The Church became nationalized through and through, and people began to ascribe an almost dogmatic significance to national peculiarities. They contrasted Russian faith and Russian rites against not only Latinism but also against inherited Greek traditions.

The Russian church pursued its own idiosyncratic brand of Orthodoxy. In 1551, Russian Orthodox leaders published the Stoglav, a collection of ecclesiastical and liturgical rules binding on all Russian Orthodox believers, clergy and laity alike; some of the rules differed from, and some conflicted with, prevailing Greek Orthodox regulations and practice, but the Russians ignored the discrepancies in favor of their own “national peculiarities”.  

A hundred years later, in the mid-17^th century, the proud Russian Church would find itself in crisis, precipitated by a series of liturgical reforms which so offended the faithful that millions of Russian Christians eventually withdrew from the official Orthodox Church—and, in the process, released chaotic spiritual energies that reverberate to this day.

The Messiah We Deserve

“Whirlpools of passions are increasingly rapidly attracting people to whirl in a dangerous dance.” (Jesus of Siberia)

These are troubled times. The good news is that Jesus is back; the bad news is that the authorities are on to him. According to news reports out of Russia:

The leader of an influential religious sect who claims to be Jesus has been arrested in the depths of Siberia, police say. Sergei Torop, who is known to his followers as ‘Vissarion’, was arrested alongside two of his aides. Russia’s Investigations Committee alleges the group caused emotional and physical harm to their followers and extorted money. 

The three men stand accused of “establishing a religious association whose activities involve violence against individuals and of inflicting grievous bodily harm to two or more people,” a spokesperson for the committee said, according to state media.

Is that so? Extortion of money and infliction of grievous bodily harm? Inconceivable! ¹

“Then Peter said, ‘Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for your land? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God.’ When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died.” {Acts of The Apostles, 5:3-5}

In Russia, the authorities came to arrest Jesus of Siberia, risking an apocalyptic showdown: “I could call on my Father, and He would send me twelve legions of angels”. The call, however, did not go through:

The 59-year-old cult leader Sergei Torop was detained by security forces following a special operation on Tuesday that saw helicopters and armed officers surround the sect’s communes in a remote region of Siberia. The men could face up to 12 years in prison if found guilty, according to the RIA news agency.

Prison? Good luck: 

“It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church. After arresting Peter, he put him in prison, intending to bring him out for public trial after the Passover. The night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries stood guard at the entrance. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared, and a light shone in the cell. The angel struck Peter on the side and woke him up. ‘Quick, get up!” he said, and the chains fell from Peter’s wrists. Peter followed the angel out of the prison; they came to the iron gate leading to the city, and it opened for them by itself, and they went through it.” {Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 12}

Regarding Torop/Vissarion/Jesus of Siberia, skeptics abound; they ask, “Can anything good come from Siberia?”. Moreover, the man’s humble beginnings, as well as his unconventional teachings and countercultural lifestyle, are a stumbling block to many:  

Mr. Torop founded the Church of the Last Testament in Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He claims to have been ‘reborn’ in 1990 as a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. The former traffic police officer has amassed thousands of followers, some of whom are said to believe him to be a returned Christ. The sect’s followers established a settlement called the City of the Sun, in Kuraga region of Siberia in 1995. Hundreds of other believers reside in other settlements in the region. Followers of the sect – known as Vissarionites – are not allowed to smoke, drink or use money, and are expected to live frugally. ² They also abstain from consuming meat, coffee, tea, sugar, and other products.

In his “Sermon on the Tundra,” Jesus of Siberia eloquently denounced the reign of Mammon:

“The main essence of all corruption is the desire to gain additional earnings of conditional monetary units, which in the existing world are constantly demonstrated and approved as the most important benefits. There are also statements about spiritual values as something even more important than material ones, but the very structure of human society's life structure has been structured in such a way that one invariably forces a person to make basic life choices precisely in the direction of the desire to extract as many conventional trade values as possible, as men understand clearly that with the help of such conditional values it is possible to buy everything desired.”

Indeed: what does it profit a man to gain additional earnings of conditional monetary units if he has no need for them in the City of the Sun? As was said by the prophets long ago, Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy. ³ And, as the Lord himself has explained, in his famous “Shaken, not stirred” discourse:

“If you want to create a homogeneous solution to pour into a container with water a handful of heterogeneous, similar to each other small particles, and then begin to actively shake such a mixture, you can see that in the process of stirring the whole solution will look monochrome and homogeneous. But it will only be visibility. It is necessary to stop stirring, and over time it will be possible to observe the current situation, when it will be visible not only a homogeneous solution, but also the precipitation of heavier particles and pop-up lightweight particles that formed foam.”

Who has ears to hear, let them figure it out for themselves: “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.”  

Make no mistake: this is not your grandparents’ Jesus. Whereas Jesus of Nazareth said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” Jesus of Siberia has taken things a step or two further: “Torop rejected his first wife and married a nineteen-year-old who had lived with him since she was a girl of seven. He has six children from the two marriages.”

It is all too easy to mock:

Mr. Torop’s religious beliefs combine elements of the Russian Orthodox Church with preparations for the apocalypse. According to local media, Mr Torop once claimed that Jesus was watching over his disciples from an orbit close to Earth and that the Virgin Mary was running Russia.

The “Jesus in orbit” theory (which may have been inspired by, or stolen from, Philip K. Dick) was rendered obsolete by Torop’s realization that he is Jesus. For her part, the Virgin Mary reportedly succumbed to a chemical nerve agent (Novichok^©) and has been in a coma for the past twenty years. Finally, as for the apocalypse: Verily, when the Abomination of Desolation doth reign from the Whitewashed House—mark this, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the sign of the beast, and orange is the color of the demon’s hair--you will know the last days are upon you. There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth, but what can you do?

Nowhere is it written that we will get the messiah we need. It is just as likely we will get the messiah we deserve. 

_____________________________________

Quotes (other than those I made up) have been taken from the following sources:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/cult-leader-jesus-arrested-russia-sergei-torop-siberia-b550242.html

http://vissarion.name/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vissarion

The New Testament

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

¹ I do not think that word means what I think it means.

² Alice Walker: “Expect nothing. / Live frugally / on surprise.”

³ And love: Money can’t buy me love, either.

"Captivating Satan"

One of the more fascinating figures I have encountered in my exploration of Russian history is Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945), a woman touted as Russia’s “first feminist”. She was also called (by her contemporaries) a “demoness” and a “decadent Madonna”; by all accounts, she delighted in those labels and did her best to live up to them.

In a brief but appreciative article last year (at Russia Beyond the Headlines), Savannah Whaley described Ms. Gippius as having been “an eminent and significant Russian poet, prose writer and critic. Her poetic and cultural influence went hand in hand with her refusal to conform to prescribed notions of femininity. Admired by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, Gippius was a central figure in the established cultural elite of her day, despite being highly subversive.”  

Gippius’ “day” was what is known as the “Silver Age” of Russian culture (circa 1890 through 1915), during which time Gippius and her husband, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, held court, as it were, in St. Petersburg; their literary salons, art exhibits, and scandalously unorthodox religious services attracted (and sometimes shocked) the likes of Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, and Nikolai Berdyaev.

Gippius was something of a prodigy; she started writing poetry at the age of seven and was a published poet by nineteen. "By the year 1880,” she wrote, “I was writing verses, being a great believer in 'inspiration', and making it a point never to take my pen away from paper. People around me saw these poems as a sign of my being 'spoiled', but I never tried to conceal them and, of course, I wasn't spoiled at all..."   

In Whaley’s profile, Ms. Gippius sound like the Patti Smith of her age:

Gippius was an innovative poet who was at the heart of the first wave of Russian Symbolism; many subsequent Symbolist poets based their technique on her experiments with rhyme and meter. Gippius played with decadent motifs and themes of the sacred and the profane; she formulated an ideology that “art should materialize only in the spiritual,” and her spirituality – like many other aspects of her life – was unconventional and linked to a pursuit of spiritual freedom. “My soul is bare, stripped to the purest bareness,” she wrote in her 1905 poem “The Wedding Ring” – “It has escaped, transcended all its bounds.”

Gippius’ influence on the culture of Russia’s Silver Age cannot be overstated. Merezhkovsky, her husband and an esteemed author himself, frequently took Gippius’ ideas and incorporated them into his own projects. The couple’s foray into philosophical and religious matters is a notable example:

Analyzing the roots of Russia’s cultural crisis, Gippius suggested as a remedy the 'Christianization' of Russian culture, which meant bringing the intelligentsia and the Church closer together. Merging faith and intellect, according to Gippius, was crucial for the survival of Russia; only religious ideas, she thought, would bring its people enlightenment and liberation, both sexual and spiritual.

What Russia needed, agreed Gippius and Merezhkovsky, was a "New Religious Consciousness," which they set out to provide:

In 1901 Gippius and Merezhkovsky co-founded the Religious and Philosophical Meetings. This 'gathering for free discussion', focusing on the synthesis of culture and religion, brought together an eclectic mix of intellectuals and was regarded in retrospect as an important, if short-lived, attempt to pull Russia back from the major social upheavals it was headed for. Gippius was the driving force behind the Meetings...

After the Meetings were shuttered, Gippius tried again, this time more flamboyantly:

Gippius tried to revive her initial idea in the form of what was regarded as her 'domestic Church', based on the controversial “Brotherhood of Three” composed of herself, Merezhkovsky, and Dmitry Filosofov, their mutual close friend and, for a short while, her lover. ¹ This new development outraged many of their friends, who saw this bizarre parody on the Trinity, with its own set of quasi-religious rituals, as bordering on blasphemy.

It must have taken remarkable courage to challenge (flout?) gender norms in late 19^th- and early 20^th century Russia. Whaley remarks:

Poetry was also a space in which Gippius could escape gender expectations. She often adopted a male persona in her work and was criticized for using the masculine endings of verbs and personal pronouns. In response she asserted that she wanted to “write poetry not just as a woman but as a human being.” Gippius treated her life as art and used it as another medium through which to explore her creative philosophy, associating herself with the gothic figure of the spider and using decadent motifs and imagery throughout her poetry…

According to Whaley, Gippius was as charismatic as she was transgressive:

Gippius’s personal style was both elaborate and subversive. She would sometimes wear ostentatiously feminine dress deemed “inappropriate” by many around her, affecting an image and attitude that parodied conventional conceptions of femininity. Andrei Bely, one of the most important Russian symbolists, described her as “a human-sized wasp,” going on to say that “a lump of distended red hair … concealed a small, crooked face … the charm of her bony, hipless skeleton recalled a communicant deftly captivating Satan.”

She would also frequently dress in male clothes and carry a monocle, much to the horror of her contemporaries. Cross-dressing was not unheard of in the early 20^th century, but Gippius’s presence as a dandy, a stylistically androgynous but essentially male figure, reveals the complexity of her self-crafted identity.

Along with many other members of the “Silver Age” intelligentsia, Gippius and Merezhkovsky left Russia after the Bolshevik uprising, never to return. Gippius, in her memoirs, made clear her disdain for the antagonists of 1917:

Like mice for whom the world amounts to just themselves and cats, those 'revolutionaries' knew but one sort of distinction: that between the left and the right. Kerensky and his kind intrinsically saw themselves as the 'left', regarding their enemies as 'the right'.  They weren't afraid of the Bolsheviks – they belonged to the 'left' too. They never believed the Bolsheviks would be able to keep the power they had taken, and failed to notice how the latter, having stolen their slogans, started to use them with ingenuity, speaking of 'land for peasants', 'peace for everybody',  ‘republic,’ ‘freedom,’ and all that..

Contemporaneously, she chronicled in her diary some of the horrors of revolution:

"It felt as if some pillow fell on you to strangle... Strangle what — the city? The country? No, something much, much bigger. In Kiev 1200 officers killed; legs severed, boots taken off. In Rostov, teenager cadets shot down — for being mistakenly taken for Constitutional Democratic Party cadets, the banned ones. Those who still have a soul in them walk around like corpses: neither protesting, nor suffering, waiting for nothing, bodies and souls slumped into hunger-induced dormancy."

Savannah Whaley finds inspiration in Gippius’ life and work:

In her 1905 poem “Incantation,” she calls out, “Beat, heart, beat each heart in turn! / Rise up, each unshackled soul!” Over a century later, this battle cry still challenges us to embrace individuality and recognize the freedom that can come from defying society’s expected norms.

 As Gippius herself wrote,

I hate to submit to the people’s desire.

Who likes the yoke of a slave?

Through whole our life we’re in permanent trial,

After – we lay in a grave.

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 https://www.rbth.com/literature/2014/11/20/a_life_unshackled_remembering_the_symbolist_poet_zinaida_gippius_41541.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida_Gippius

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/yevgeny/gippius/freedom.html

¹ The song “Triad,” written by David Crosby and recorded by the Jefferson Airplane, comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Aej9wmoQ7M

Sunday Sermon

Transfiguration: On Becoming All Flame

According to Eastern Orthodox theology, theosis is the process of deification undergone by believers in Christ, a process begun at baptism, abetted by the sacrament of the Eucharist and by proper Christian living, and completed only at Jesus’ still-awaited return (Parousia). One element of theosis is what is called “the transfiguration of the believer,” linked to the gospel story of Jesus’ transfiguration:

“After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves.  There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.” {Matthew 17}

Rev. Nichifor Tanase has elaborated on the Orthodox tradition and belief:

The first to connect the Transfiguration specifically with theosis is St. Andrew of Crete. For him, the Transfiguration is the revelation of the deified humanity of Christ…St. Gregory Palamas defend the reality of the encounter with God of those monks who reported seeing a vision of light at the culmination of intense period of prayer. For the light is nothing less than the uncreated radiance of God – a divine energy accessible to the senses.

The Orthodox Church makes great use of visual representations of its ideas. Rev. Tanase cites one example of “transfiguration”:

Within a blue mandorla of the St Catherine monastery, eight rays emanate from Jesus. Following the interpretation of A. Andreopoulos, the so-called “hesychastic” mandorla have three suggestions: triadologic (the circle, the square and the rhombus), eschatologic (an octagon in the geometric shapes), and cosmologic (sacred map of the universe). ¹

Rev. Tanase continues:

For all four Gospels, the manifestation of Christ’s glory (shekinah, doxa) has a central place.

Importantly, the transfiguration was not a one-time historical event, nor was Jesus the only human to be transfigured:

This manifestation of Christ is not something external to ourselves: “It is only by having Christ radiant within us that we can enter into the truth which even in the Gospels is veiled from ordinary eyes”. The Transfiguration becomes an interior experience: “The presence of the three apostles points to the ecclesial dimension of theosis. We cannot attain our full human stature as isolated individuals.”

For those who are neither Christians nor theists, there are still lessons here regarding the importance—the sacral nature, even—of “interior experience” and the necessity of relationship and community. The philosophy of Personalism, as espoused by the likes of Emmanuel Mounier and Nicholas Berdyaev, features the same dual emphasis; the Russian concept of sobornost carries echoes of it as well. ²  

Time after time, in this book or that book, part of this philosophy or that theology, encapsulated in this tradition or another, I find the same bedrock truth: “We cannot attain our full human stature as isolated individuals.” It turns out that Descartes’ cogito (“I think, therefore, I am”) could not have been more mistaken; the correct conclusion is “Amamus ergo sumus,” “We love, therefore, we are.”

I am not the first to arrive at this conclusion. The anonymous author of a sermon at Gosforth Parish Church (in Gosforth, England) beat me to it, and in the process explained:

We understand “person” to equate with individual - isolated, separate, alone. Maybe that imagery is at the heart of much current western malaise: loneliness, prejudice, racism, homophobia, selfishness, greed, lust. True personhood is not the same as isolated individualism. True personhood exists in relationship, in mutual, co-affirming love. True personhood is outgoing, joyful, creative, dynamic, salvific—the heart of all things: community, mutual love, outpouring praise. ³

As for transfiguration, the Gosforth preacher offered this tale from one of the desert Fathers:

Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said: “Abba, as far as I can, I keep a moderate rule, with a little fasting, and prayer, and meditation, and quiet: and as far as I can I try to cleanse my heart of evil thoughts. What else should I do?” Then the old man rose, and spread out his hands to heaven, and his fingers shone like ten candles: and he said: “If you will, you can become all flame.”

Sparks of light, separated as it were at birth: we can become all flame, but we can only do it together.

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Quotes from Rev. Nichifor Tanase are from his review of Norman Russell’s Fellow Workers with God; the interior quotes are from Russell.

¹ See reproduced illustration above.

² According to Berdyaev, “Personalism and the spirit of community are alike native to the Russian.”

³ http://www.gosforthparishchurch.org.uk/content/pages/documents/1425483506.pdf