The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: The Invisible World

{Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is remembered today for his novels: ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Moll Flanders,’ and ‘The Plague Year’. However, Defoe was not just a novelist; he was also a journalist, a merchant, a pamphleteer, and a spy. He is credited with over 500 publications of various kinds, many published under pseudonyms; his political tracts, unfortunately, displeased the authorities, and he spent some time in prison. Chronically in debt, he also found himself in debtor’s prison on occasion. The following excerpt is from his 1727 publication, ‘The History and Reality of Apparitions,’ and I reprint it here only because I find it intriguing.}

“There is more of gravy than the grave about you.” (Charles Dickens’ ‘Scrooge,’ in ‘A Christmas Carol’)

Daniel Defoe:

I have, I believe, as true a notion of the power of imagination as I ought to have, and you shall hear further from me upon that head; I believe we form as many apparitions in our fancies, as we see really with our eyes, and a great many more; nay, our imaginations sometimes are very diligent to embark the eyes, and the ears too, in the delusion, and persuade us to believe we see specters and appearances, and hear noises and voices, when, indeed, neither the Devil or any other spirit, good or bad, has troubled themselves about us.

But it does not follow from thence that therefore there are no such things in nature; that there is no intercourse or communication between the world of spirits and the world we live in; that the inhabitants of the invisible spaces, be those where you please, have no converse with us, and that they never take the liberty to step down upon this globe, or to visit their friends here; and, in short, that they have nothing to do with or say to us, or we with or to them. The inquiry is not, as I take it, whether they really come hither or not, but who they are that do come?

Spirit is certainly something that we do not fully understand, in our present confined circumstances; and as we do not fully understand the thing so neither can we distinguish its operations. As we at present conceive of it, it is an unrestrained, unlimited being, except by such laws of the invisible state which at present we know little of; its way of conversing we know nothing of, other than this, that we believe, and indeed see reason for it, that it can act in an invisible and imperceptible manner; it moves without being prescribed or limited by space, it can come and not be seen, go and not be perceived; it is not to be shut in by doors, or shut out by bolts and bars; in a word, it is unconfined by all those methods which we confine our actions by, or by which we understand ourselves to be limited and prescribed.

Yet, notwithstanding all this, it converses here, is with us, and among us; corresponds, though unembodied, with our spirits, which are embodied; and this conversing is by not only an invisible, but to us an inconceivable way; it is neither tied down to speech or to vision, but moving in a superior orb, conveys its meaning to our understandings, its measures to our conceptions; deals with the imagination, and works it up to receive such impressions as serve for its purpose; and yet at the same time we are perfectly passive, and have no agency in, or knowledge of the matter.

By this silent converse all the kind notices of approaching evil or good are conveyed to us, which are sometimes so evident, and come with such an irresistible force upon the mind, that we must be more than stupid if we do not perceive them; and if we are not extremely wanting to ourselves, we may take such due warning by them as to avoid the evils which we had notice of in that manner, and to embrace the good that is offered to us. Nor are there many people alive who can deny but they have had such notices, by which, if they had given due attention to them, they had been assisted to save themselves from the mischiefs which followed; or had, on the other hand, taken hold of such and such advantages as had been offered for their good; for it is certainly one of the grand and most important difficulties of human life to know whether such or such things, which present in our ordinary or extraordinary circumstances, are for our good, as they seem to be, and as may be pretended, or not, and whether it is proper for us to accept them or not; and many unhappily stand in the way of their own prosperity for want of knowing what to accept of and what to refuse.

If there is an invisible world, and if spirits residing or inhabiting are allowed to be there, or placed there by the supreme governing power of the universe, it will be hard to prove that it is impossible they should come hither, or that they should not have liberty to show themselves here, and converse in this globe, as well as in all the other globes or worlds, which, for aught we know, are to be found in that immense space; reason does not exclude them, nature yields to the possibility, and experience with a cloud of witnesses in all ages confirm the reality of the affirmative.

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Daniel Defoe - Wikipedia

Wednesday with Pascal: More Ado about Nothing

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat finds that the topic of nihilism has an uncanny appeal, both to those who welcome it and to those who stand athwart it, hollering “Stop!” For instance, the philosopher/musician Billy Preston shared his discovery that “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing,” an insight which earned him the Nobel Prize for Philosophical Funk. On the other hand, the sainted Augustine claimed that evil, from a metaphysical standpoint, does not exist; it is, quite literally, Nothing. This world then, with its abundant evils, may be considered Nothingness Incarnate, or Nothingness Inc. The point is, it is never difficult to say something about nothing; Pascal, for one, does it all the time.}  

The world is a theophany, an epiphany of things themselves unseen. (A.K. Coomaraswamy)

Is it necessary that we be deceived regarding the nature of our reality? (Philip K. Dick)

All the new thinking is about nihilism, of which there are many forms, ranging from (roughly) “nothing matters” to (roughly) “nothing is real” to (roughly) “nothing exists”. The latter view is often associated with Buddhism, although no true Buddhist (as the saying goes) would accept that association. In any case, to quote Bob Dylan, “Too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease,” and the same holds true for discussions of nihilism, which is why the subject is avoided at dinner parties and family gatherings.   

The late Ananda Coomaraswamy was a metaphysician, a historian, and a transmitter and interpreter of the culture and art of ancient India. Born in what is now Sri Lanka, Coomaraswamy lived and was educated in Britain; he later moved to the United States. He is generally associated with Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon as one of the iconic figures of what is called Traditionalism (or Perennialism).  

The ‘Tradition,’ as its adherents see it, is a repository of ancient universal wisdom, traces of which are said to be detected in all religious traditions. Traditionalists reject Modernity, with its emphasis on instrumental reason, science, and other repugnant practices; they believe that higher knowledge is to be found through spirituality and through esoteric practices like alchemy and magic. While they cannot deny the success of modern science, they claim that it distracts us from a deeper Reality, one not accessible either to empiricism or to discursive reason, much less to technological machinations. For a variety of reasons not relevant here, Traditionalism has appealed to, and has been associated with, postwar neo-Fascist thinkers like Julius Evola, Alexander Dugin, Viktor Orban, and Steve Bannon. Political implications aside, Traditionalism’s claims have been appropriated by New Age cults (and charlatans) of all kinds; the movement’s distaste for empiricism serves it well, as its assertions can neither be proven nor disproven in the lowly material realm in which we are trapped.  

Traditionalism teaches that there are three basic sources of genuine wisdom: intuition, contemplation, and revelation. This excerpt from an essay (“In the Wake of the Fall”) by Frithjof Schuon helps to illustrate the Traditionalists’ worldview:

It is not surprising that a science arising out of the fall ¹ and out of an illusory rediscovery of the sensory world should also be a science of nothing but the sensory and that it should deny everything which surpasses that domain, thereby denying God, the next world, and the soul. This also presupposes a denial of the pure Intellect, which alone is capable of knowing everything that modern science rejects.

Science, in its arrogance, does not stop with denying the pure Intellect, but also denies “Revelation, which alone rebuilds the bridge broken by the fall.” Schuon offers an example of science’s folly:

According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical illusion due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere. From this point of view, it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. But it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heavens and celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things but from ignorance mixed with imagination and sentimentality. The blue sky is a direct and adequate symbol of the higher, supra-sensory degrees of Existence, indeed, a distant reverberation of those degrees. It is truly a symbol, consecrated by the sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples.

In case further explanation is needed, Schuon is happy to oblige:

A symbol is intrinsically so concrete and so efficacious that celestial manifestations, when they occur in our sensory world, ‘descend’ to earth and ‘ascend’ to heaven; a symbolism accessible to the senses takes on the function of the supra-sensible reality which it reflects. Light-years and the relativity of the space-time relationship have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly ‘exact’ and ‘positive’ symbolism of appearances and its connection (at once analogical and ontological) with the celestial or angelic orders. The fact that the symbol itself may be no more than an optical illusion in no way impairs its precision or its efficacy, for all appearances, including those of space and the galaxies, are strictly speaking only illusions created by relativity.

Once you have dismissed sensory reality as composed of nothing but “illusions,” you have thoroughly deconstructed, well, everything; your work is done, and you can return to contemplating the Reality behind (and symbolized by) the illusions. ² Of course, you will still have to eat, sleep, get dressed, find shelter, and perform all the other quotidian rites of mundane lower-case reality; however, you will do those things secure in your knowledge that they are ultimately meaningless, which should help you sleep at night.

That, at least, is better than nothing—isn’t it?

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Frithjof Schuon quotations are from “In the Wake of the Fall,” included in the anthology Science and the Myth of Progress. The quote from Coomaraswamy was the epigraph for that volume. Information on Traditionalism and on significant Traditionalists can be found at (where else?) Wikipedia:

Ananda Coomaraswamy - Wikipedia

Frithjof Schuon - Wikipedia

Traditionalist School (perennialism) - Wikipedia

¹ The “fall” to which Schuon refers was man’s fall from his original connection to the divine and into the abyss of the human ego. No fruit was involved, nor a serpent or even a God.

² You will know when you are in touch with Reality because it will be capitalized. Should you reach that State, please tell the pure Intellect I said hello.

Nothing to See Here

Saturday Lecture: The Zeitgeist It Is A-Changin'

{I don’t know much about Ross Barkan, but he apparently hasn’t read (or doesn’t remember) Pascal. “For thousands of years,” Barkan informs us, as he blithely explains today’s Zeitgeist, “mature human beings knew how to be alone in their own thoughts and tolerate boredom.” Compare this smug observation with Pascal (17th century): “All humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It also seems that Barkan, who was born in 1989, is unaware that New Age spirituality is not new: e.g., New Age - Wikipedia or, for an even longer historical view, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment. Those caveats aside, Barkan’s recent essay is indicative of—well, of something.}

Ross Barkan (from “The Zeitgeist Is Changing” ¹):

Church attendance, long the barometer of the US’s devotion to the unseen, has continued to plummet, but taking its place isn’t any of the pugnacious New Atheism that tugged at the discourse for a stretch of the 2000s. Instead, it’s what can be loosely termed “spirituality” – a devotion to astrology, witchcraft, magic and manifestation – that has emerged, particularly among the young. Online life, paradoxically enough, has only catalyzed this spirituality more, with teenage TikTok occultists and “manifesting” influencers racking up ever more followers.

Not all of the old romantics were opposed to Judeo-Christian religion, but they were drawn, like the youth of today, to spiritual realms that operated far beyond any biblical teachings or rationalist precepts. They were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment on the human spirit. They feared, ultimately, an inhuman future – and hence their rebellion. Today’s romantics, still nascent, sense something similar. Why else, in such an algorithmic and data-clogged age – with so much of existence quantifiable and knowable – would magic suddenly hold such sway?

What explains the dominance of digital charlatans who promise all of life’s riches are at hand if only you visualize hard enough or utter the correct incantations. ² Embracing the paranormal or believing, wholeheartedly, that star positions can determine personalities can be harmless fun – until the delusions become life-consuming and despair takes hold when they inevitably do not deliver on their promise.

Irrationality, on its own, is no virtue, and some of the romantics of the 19th and 21st centuries succumb to the same ancient dross, magic alone as the supposed channel to transcendence. That spiritualism has spread with tech is an irony fitting of the age.

Against the hype of progress, the new romantics wonder: what good has any of this done for us? Were hyper-sophisticated GPS devices, cameras, and video recorders worth it? It is too soon to predict a revival of the Luddites, but there has been at least one press report of a teen group ditching smartphones altogether because “social media and phones are not real life”. Science brought about these revolutions; science compressed once unimaginable computing power into a single handheld device. Science now promises a great leap forward with artificial intelligence, which seems intent on replacing the arts themselves – machines will now make mediocre art, music, literature, and even fact-challenged journalism.

For now, rapacious tech still has a mass buy-in. Smartphones are ubiquitous. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google are hegemonic. Mark Zuckerberg sculpts his pharaonic Hawaii compound. He and his ilk own the present. Whether they own the future, forevermore, is no longer clear. Generational change is hard on the incumbents. And romanticism won’t hold still; it promises, at the minimum, a wild and unsteady flame. What it burns is still anyone’s guess. ³

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The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms | Ross Barkan | The Guardian

Ross Barkan - Wikipedia

¹ Experts say that, for best results, your zeitgeist should be changed every generation or so, perhaps at the same time you refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ("The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure."  Thomas Jefferson) I would also recommend that you take your zeitgeist in for a tune-up every five years or every 80,000 miles, whichever comes first.

² Belief in incantations and ritual formulae is shocking to Christians? That seems odd.

³ As is, for that matter, whatever Ross Barkan is going on about.  

You may not be interested in the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist is interested in you.

Wednesday without Pascal

Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has asked to be excused from today’s posting. Given that he skipped last Wednesday as well, an explanation would seem to be in order.

In his ongoing quest to understand Modernity, Postmodernity, and Anti-modernity, Pascal found himself reading up on Traditionalism, an antimodern movement which began with Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon in the early twentieth century. While originally conceived and presented as a neo-Gnostic esoteric spirituality (linked to what has been called the “Perennial Philosophy”), Traditionalism soon morphed into a political ideology with strong links to fascism (because of its emphasis on order, stability, and hierarchy) via the likes of Julius Evola and, more recently, Russia’s Alexander Dugin. Closer to home, and perhaps not quite so fascistic, Steve Bannon, who served as campaign manager for Donald Trump in 2016, is an avowed Traditionalist, although he puts his own spin on it and disavows the blatantly racist elements which other Traditionalists embrace.

As Pascal learned more about Traditionalism, he discovered that many Traditionalists in Russia invoke the long-held belief that Russia has a messianic destiny to serve as a bulwark against Western decadence. This aligns with an existing “Eurasian” view in which Russia and Germany should be allied in the defense of the European heartland against “Atlanticist” nations, primarily Great Britain and the United States.

On top of which, Russian Orthodox Christians earlier appropriated an obscure Greek word found in St. Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians; the word was ‘katechon,’ and it means either “that which restrains” or “he who restrains”. Paul was explaining why the eschaton, the end times, had not yet arrived and why Jesus had not yet returned. Paul claimed that some mysterious (to outsiders, not to Paul) force and/or person was delaying the “man of lawlessness’ (read, the Antichrist). Paul’s language was cryptic in the extreme, but he did indicate that he had spoken of these matters in person when he was in Thessalonica, and that the Thessalonians should therefore understand his meaning. We have no way of knowing whether they did or, if they did, what they thought about it. Two thousand years later, we have no idea who or what Paul identified as ‘the katechon’; we do not know if Paul thought it was a servant of God or a tool of Satan; and we have no clue as to the basis of Paul’s claimed knowledge of eschatological events.

In any case, the point here is that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat added a study of the katechon to his ongoing study of Traditionalism. One of the first things he learned about modern references to a katechon was that the German legal and political theorist (and Nazi) Carl Schmitt had made the concept an integral part of his political vision. In every era, Schmitt asserted, a katechon was necessary to hold back the forces of chaos and to protect the social, cultural, spiritual, and national orders. That katechon, though it might be someone as repugnant as Adolf Hitler, served an invaluable purpose; without it, Schmitt thought, Yeats’ eschatological nightmare—Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed—would be realized.

To sum up: Pascal is busy now pursuing threads of Traditionalism entangled and entwined with Russian messianic visions, Carl Schmitt’s politics, and the mystery of the katechon. When you consider that prominent political figures like Viktor Orban (currently President of Turkey Hungary) and, as previously mentioned, Steve Bannon, adhere (or claim to adhere) to at least parts of the Traditionalist worldview, you can understand why Pascal has become—well, let us just say preoccupied with those subjects. 

And that is why he has taken today off. Should you have the least interest in following Pascal down these various rabbit holes: Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, Rene Guenon's The Reign of Quantity and his The Crisis of the Modern World, Alexander Dugin's The Fourth Political Theory, St. Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians, Benjamin Teitelbaum's War for Eternity, Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World, and Mark Sedgwick's Against the Modern World are good places to start.   

Eschewing fame and fortune as a matinee idol, Rene Guenon turned to metaphysics instead...

Sunday Sermon: Getting Over the Astonishment

Emmanuel Carrere (from The Kingdom):

There are people for whom being isn’t something you take for granted. From childhood they wonder: What am I doing here? And what’s “I”? And what’s “here”?

A lot of people can live their whole lives without ever being bothered by such questions—or if they are, it’s only very fleetingly, and they have no problem getting over them. They manufacture cars and drive around, they make love, talk at the coffee machine, get pissed off because there are too many foreigners in their country, or too many people who think there are too many foreigners in their country; they plan their vacations, worry about their children, want to change the world or be successful—and when they are, they’re afraid of becoming less successful; they make war, know that they’re going to die but think about it as little as possible; and all of that is quite enough to fill a life.

But there’s also another type of person for whom it’s not enough. Or too much. In any case, they’re not content with things as they are. You can argue all you want about whether they are more or less wise than others, but the fact is they’ve never gotten over their astonishment, and can’t live without asking why they’re living, what it all means, and whether it means anything at all. For them, existence is a question mark, and even if they don’t exclude the possibility that there’s no answer, they go on searching, they can’t help it. As others have searched before them—and some even claim they’ve found “it”—they listen to their testimonies. They read Plato and the mystics, they become what are known as religious minds—sometimes outside of any church.

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Emmanuel Carrère - Wikipedia

Sunday Sermon: Detecting the Pulse of the Cosmos

“And Jesus said, ‘The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.’” [From “The Gospel of Thomas”]

Mark Vernon (from A Secret History of Christianity):

Something is going wrong with Christianity. In the western world, it’s not hard to make the case that something has already gone terminally wrong. People are abandoning their churches in droves or, more commonly, simply steering clear of the services that nourished their forebears. In spite of sustained attempts to reverse the decline, nothing seems able to stop it.

The root issue lies with how Christianity has come to be presented or, to be more precise, how Christians have come to misunderstand its message. What was once experienced as a pathway to more life has, today, morphed into a way of life that to outsiders seems self-evidently deluded, defensive, or distorted. The almost limitless capacities of the human soul, which in the past have been articulated and explored by Christianity’s exponents, have been largely forgotten by Christians today, and sometimes actively rejected. The working assumption of many western people is that Christianity will curtail your options, not expand your life, let alone affirm the truth about yourself. The people whom sociologists call ‘spiritual but not religious’ or ‘nones’ shrink from Christianity.

Most Christian apologists haven’t really understood the nature of the problem. Evangelicals try to sell or prove Christianity, not to learn or to grow, while theological liberals try to cut Christianity back, feeling they must conform to, not test, contemporary secular assumptions. Both sides try to whittle away the secret sense of life to which the historical Jesus was supremely alert.  

That sense of life is ‘secret’ in the sense of being hard to see even when plainly spelled out. It’s secret in a way that a treasure is secret even though it is, in truth, resting beneath your feet, waiting to be found. It’s a perception that can be known just like the quiet constancy of your breath. It is a truth that is yours to discover. It can be known directly, not on the basis of someone else’s report, someone else’s authority, or someone else’s rhetoric, but inwardly and reliably—though it’s the work of a lifetime fully to align with it.

This is, in fact, standard mystical theology. It follows from the discernment that ‘God’ is not another being but is the ground of Being itself. God is the poetry in the poem, the fire in the equations, the life in the living, the pulse of the cosmos. Christian truth must be inhabited to be understood. Over the last four or five hundred years, Christian churches have been losing touch with this inner element—because of the impact of the Reformation, the rise of science, the separation of psychology from spirituality, etc. But it can be rediscovered. Like the pearl of great price, this truth is waiting to be uncovered. 

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Mark Vernon, A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness (2019)

Sunday Sermon: Prayer

“Without prayer it is impossible to live; without prayer everything turns to madness and horror.” (Vasily Rozanov)

“Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of creation. It makes history possible.” (Jacques Ellul)

Jacques Ellul, from Prayer and Modern Man:

Man in our society cannot understand prayer except as a sort of pious language addressed to God. Every other reality is closed to him. Now precisely because prayer is not that, he cannot pray in truth. That is the tragedy.

What can prayer mean for the man of the Western world who looks upon it purely as a discourse? This false conception is undisputed, widespread, and habitual in all the churches. As long as one is living in Christian security in a Christianized society, in a world in which to be a Christian is ‘normal,’ ‘correct,’ and taken for granted, one can continue to pronounce such discourses—but they are not prayers. The sociologist can seize upon them as a certain kind of language in the domain of custom, of ritual, of spiritual hygiene. These prayers go on, without result, because the milieu presupposes them. When the milieu changes, becomes secularized, unchurched, then one perceives clearly that these discourses make no contact with reality.

I can always compose a discourse supposedly addressed to God. I can arrange the sentences, but it is neither the harmony of the form, nor the elevation of the content, nor the fullness of the information which turns it into a prayer. It becomes prayer by the decision of the One to whom it is addressed, but then its nature undergoes a change. Henceforth there is a ‘quid’ which eludes our grasp. The entire prayer is the prayer of the Spirit. Only when the Spirit intercedes in a way which cannot be expressed, which transcends all verbalizing and all language, then is it truly prayer: it is a relationship with the One. Prayer is a gift from the One, and its reality depends upon that alone. Prayer receives its content not from what I have to say but from the One to whom it is addressed. It is from the One that my speech acquires its validity.  Prayer is not a discourse; it is a way of life.

Prayer is the begetting of a future. It is not there to complete a past, nor to assure a present. It is there to realize a future, to assure the possibility of a history, the history of my own life, that it be not the gloomy repetition of undefined moments without meaning. It is there to assure the history of my church, that it be not the inconsistency of good intentions and of formless impieties. It is there to assure the history of my people, that it be not an accumulation of oppressions, of hatreds and injustices. That is to say that prayer is there in order that there might truly be a history at all levels, and not a succession of futile, meaningless actions.

Nothingness at work expresses itself in the impossibility of history, in futility, in incongruity (the transient, the unstable, the irresponsible, the disorganized, the non-normal, etc.). Prayer gives consistency to life, to action, to human relations, to the facts of human existence, both small and great. Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of the creation. It makes history possible. Therefore it is victory over nothingness.

Schubart's Unvarnished Sympathy

{As promised, I here begin a more detailed look at Walter Schubart’s Russia and Western Man, specifically the book’s Chapter Five, “The Spiritual History of the Russians”.}

Given my own status as a late-blooming Russophile, I share the late Walter Schubart’s enthusiasm for Russian spirituality, an enthusiasm that may or may not have been tempered by the year he spent in a Soviet prison camp in Kazakhstan, where he died in 1942. Nonetheless, I must caution the reader that, based on my own reading and research, “The Spiritual History of the Russians” may not be entirely objective, accurate, or reliable. Schubart was far too prone to romanticizing his subject, as well as to sweeping generalizations about history, nations, and people. With that in mind, let’s see what the man had to say.

In the beginning, writes Schubart, “The Russian soul was harmoniously tuned.” The “beginning” to which he refers is the era of “Kievan Rus’,” which is to say, Old Russia before Mongols and Tartars (and Peter the Great, oh my) came along. “A harmonious spirit pervaded the whole of ancient Russian Christendom,” just as it had pervaded western Europe during what Schubart calls the “Gothic Age” (medieval times). Despite the encroachment of decadent Western ways in recent centuries, Schubart asserts that the same harmonious spirit is still evident in Russia:

“The countenance of all Russian priests expresses an inner harmony. With their mild features and flowing hair, they are reminiscent of old portraits of Saints. What a contrast to the smooth, severe countenances and stern Roman features of the Western Jesuits!”  

Confirming his impressions, Schubart quotes the Orthodox theologian and historian Ivan Arseniev:

“The tranquil quality of [the Orthodox priest’s] spiritual demeanor, the mildness of his bearing and his intellectual moderation, so far removed from every form of eccentricity or hysteria, are particularly characteristic of the Russian Holy man. His expression is both manly and humble.” ¹

Schubart goes on to note that “The most perfect expression of the Russian sense of harmony is the belief in the God-manhood of Christ. According to Sergei Bulgakov, this constitutes the ‘very heart of Christianity’. Promethean civilization [in the West] started by tearing asunder God and world, religion and culture, into two hostile halves,” ² a fatal metaphysical error that Russia has so far avoided—or had avoided, at least, as of 1938.

Western Christianity, claims Schubart, and Protestantism in particular, has made Christian belief an increasingly private matter; by contrast, non-Promethean (or “less Promethean”) Russia has steadfastly insisted on the Christ-like integrity of the believer, who can no more separate her religion from her public life than she can separate her human self from her divine self. God-manhood constitutes an ontological intimacy as well as an eschatological goal: “Eternal God and eternal Man (Adam) are essentially related,” explains Schubart; “the God-manhood of Christ is a symbol of the closest relationship between God and man, between heaven and earth.” God and man, Schubart says, are “so alike and so attuned to one another that Christ was able to become an organic personal unity.” Some Orthodox theologians have gone so far as to suggest that not only Jesus, but every human being is God incarnate.

Giving credit where credit is due: here, Schubart was right to emphasize the significance of “God-manhood”. It is indeed a central doctrine in Orthodox Christianity, and it was central to Russian thinkers like Solovyov and Berdyaev, both of whom attempted to persuade modern Christians that "made in the image and likeness of God" is more than metaphor. A clever exegete can make the case that the words of Scripture, “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder,” apply as much to the divine-human nature as they do to the institution of marriage.

However, it seems excessive to claim, as Schubart did, that “The Russians have always held fast to this tremendous concept…God-manhood is an integral part of the Russian soul and is the purest and loftiest symbol of its inner harmony; it is the deepest expression of the Russians’ universal feeling.” There is little evidence that the theological/metaphysical construct of God-manhood, or the attendant idea of theosis, was ever embraced or understood by ordinary Russians who, like ordinary people everywhere, have been occupied most of the time with less lofty matters. More to the point, Russia’s long-standing “peculiar institution” of serfdom, outlawed only in 1861, suggests something short of genuine respect for the God-manhood of peasants. 

Continuing "The Spiritual History of the Russians," Schubart explains when, how, and by whom the pure, harmonious soul of Russia was sullied. That unfortunate development will be the subject of my next post.      

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¹ Schubart assures us that his sources—including the famous Slavophile, Ivan Kireevsky—are “quite objective” in their assessments: as, for example, when he cites Kireevsky’s claim “that the old Russia of the Kiev period evolved her laws and statutes without any compulsion from above, without any bloody state organization, without any class, rank, or party conflicts, in a natural way out of the philosophy of the people…there were no lords or knights [but] instead, innumerable settlements or communities were scattered over the country with their own laws and their own leaders.” Citing Kireevsky on Old Russia is like citing Shelby Foote on the ante-bellum South: a liberal dose of skepticism is advised.

² Schubart quotes Martin Luther: “A Prince can be a Christian, but as a Christian he must not rule. As an individual, he may be a Christian; but his office or Principality has nothing to do with Christianity.” This attitude was the genesis of “separation of church and state”; it was later elaborated by Reinhold Niebuhr as the insoluble dichotomy of “moral man” and “immoral society”. Niebuhr, whose pessimism was rooted in his belief in Original Sin, is something of a touchstone for American conservatives, who do not seem to realize that the “privatization of religion” and the “secularization of the public square”—both of which phenomena they decry—follow logically from Niebuhr’s, and Luther’s, assertions.  

"A Moral Choir"

In my last post, I quoted Dr. Sarah Young on the “Slavophile” movement in 19^th-century Russia, a movement which emphasized (or exaggerated) the differences between Russian and Western European cultures. While many of the Slavophiles espoused secular, even atheist, viewpoints, a substantial number were believers in Orthodox Christianity; they saw Orthodoxy, in contrast to both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, as having maintained the purity of early Christianity. Among other perceived differences, the Slavophiles claimed that Western Christianity had succumbed to spiritual individualism (the Protestant Reformation being the most glaring instance); whereas “true” Christianity existed and flourished only in spiritual community, or sobornost. As Dr. Young explains:

In terms of the religious faith of Russia and the West, it is these opposing principles [custom and community versus abstract logic and the primacy of the individual] that have dictated the different subsequent development of the two branches of Christianity…

The Eastern church is viewed as being based on communal principles without the imposition of a hierarchy. Khomiakov calls this communal principle ‘sobornost’. Coming from the Russian word for ‘congregation,’ sobornost’ is a difficult term to translate; [it] expresses the idea of free spiritual unity and mutual love, and the absence of individualism, and is generally seen as standing at the center of Slavophile theory.

The notion of freedom is particularly important; this is not a unity that is imposed from above or that depends on material benefits such as security or profit; rather, it arises organically out of bonds of kinship, custom and mutual trust, each individual, guided by inner freedom, contributing to create a greater whole that leads to “the unity of humanity with God.”

Most historians agree with Dr. Young that the Slavophiles had “a tendency to ignore inconvenient political and historical realities and [to] create a fantasy version of Russia’s past”; but it’s worth pointing out that the idea of sobornost, whatever its historical reality, is entirely consistent with St. Paul’s notion of Christian life, as he explained it to the Corinthians:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit…God has so composed the body…that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”

For Paul, believers “in Christ” remain individuals yet are bound together into a spiritual body, a spiritual community, sharing both sufferings and joys without "division"; that is precisely what religious Slavophiles meant by sobornost. Nikolai Berdyaev, though himself never a member of the Slavophile camp (or any camp, for that matter), found in sobornost the very essence of Christianity and of Christian salvation: “Sobornost,” he wrote, if realized, “would embody the integral unity of freedom and communion in religious, social, political, and cultural relations.” Moreover, sobornost presaged an eschatological reality and offered a glimpse of the Kingdom: “Salvation is inconceivable except in the company of the whole of mankind; and sobornost should be seen as having eschatological as well as ecclesiological implications.” If Christians constitute, as Paul said, “one body,” how can they be saved (or lost) apart from one another? Salvation is necessarily universal, and sobornost is the earthly, partial, and imperfect analogue of mankind’s cosmic destiny.  

To be clear: for religious Slavophiles, sobornost is not just another word for “community”. ¹ For them, says Richard Hughes, “Sobornost represents communal life in the Holy Spirit, embodied within persons...” It is the presence of the Spirit, Hughes notes, rather than of some vague and transient "community spirit," that characterizes sobornost. As Berdyaev tirelessly emphasizes, the Spirit of sobornost is the Spirit of freedom, a wind blowing where it will; for believers, Spirit-filled sobornost is “the organic union of freedom and love," the Kingdom in miniature and the only eschaton worth immanentizing. ²

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http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/10/24/russian-thought-lecture-2-the-slavophiles-and-russian-communality/

http://orthodox-theology.com/media/PDF/IJOT3.2015/Richard.Hughes.pdf

¹ For secular Slavophiles, says Dr. Young, the Spirit-led community was idealized not as the Church but as the rural peasant commune. She quotes Konstantin Asakov:

A commune is a union of the people, who have renounced their egoism, their individuality, and who express their common accord; this is an act of love, a noble Christian act, which expresses itself more or less clearly in its various other manifestations. A commune thus represents a moral choir, and just as in a choir a voice is not lost, but follows the general pattern and is heard in the harmony of all voices: so in the commune the individual is not lost, but renounces his exclusiveness in favour of the general accord – and there arises the noble phenomenon of harmonious, joint existence of rational beings (consciousnesses); there arises a brotherhood, a commune – a triumph of human spirit.

“A moral choir”: I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what Wavy Gravy was getting at with the Hog Farm.

² "Immanentizing the eschaton" is the late Eric Voegelin's catchy phrase for "trying to create God's Kingdom on earth," an undertaking against which Voegelin strenuously warned.

Red Threads (Mostly)

{Reflecting my current infatuation with Russia, I offer here a few choice excerpts on the subject.}

Lev Shestov  (1866-1938) has been called a Russian version of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. He is considered, depending on whom you consult, to have been an existentialist, an irrationalist, a prophet, and/or a crank; no less than Isaiah Berlin regarded Shestov (along with Alexander Herzen) as one of modern Russia's greatest thinkers.  The following caustic critique of his native land is from Shestov's Nothing Is Impossible (1905), the book that first established his reputation:

Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar. Culture is an age-long development, and sudden grafting of it upon a race rarely succeeds. To us in Russia, civilization came suddenly, while we were still savages…we quickly submitted. In a short time we were swallowing in enormous doses those poisons which Europe had been gradually accustoming herself to, gradually assimilating through centuries. Thanks to which, the transplanting of civilization into Russia turns out to be no mild affair. A Russian had only to catch a whiff of European atmosphere, and his head began to swim. He interpreted in his own way, savage-like, whatever he heard of western success. Hearing about railways, agricultural machines, schools, municipalities, his imagination painted miracles: universal happiness, boundless freedom, paradise, wings, etc. And the more impossible his dreams, the more eager he was to believe them real.

Europe had dropped miracles ages ago; she contented herself with ideals. It is we in Russia who will go on confusing miracles with ideals, as if the two were identical, whereas they have nothing to do with each other. As a matter of fact, just because Europe had ceased to believe in miracles, and realized that all human problems resolve down to mere arrangements here on earth, ideas and ideals had been invented. But the Russian bear crept out of his hole and strolled to Europe for the elixir of life, the flying carpet, the seven-leagued shoes, and so on, thinking in all his naivete that railroads and electricity were signs that the old nurse never told a lie in her fairy tales…

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I have frequently mentioned Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) in previous posts. Berdyaev was a member of the Russian intelligentsia sent into exile in 1922, at Lenin’s order, on what has come to be known as “the philosophers’ ship”. The following is a reflection from Berdyaev on the Russian people’s yearning for sobornost, a kind of “collective, organic” solidarity, something more than self-centered individualism and less than mindless collectivism:

The Russian people are informed by a peculiar, instinctive tendency to collectivism—a collectivism, however, which should not be understood primarily in political or sociological terms. It would be more accurate to speak of a tendency to communism, implying as it does not a mere collection of people, but their communion with one another. We never knew or experienced individualism in the Western sense of the word, as formulated in the humanist civilization of Europe; but this did not prevent us from deeply appreciating the problem of the relation between personality and universal social harmony. No one, in fact, has stated this problem with the power of, e.g., Dostoevsky and Belinsky. [Russian writers and thinkers], whatever the differences of their respective positions, were concerned with the relation of the collective, organic and ‘soborny’ culture to the individualistic culture of the West. But Russian practice was, more often than not, illustrative of distorted and falsified ‘sobornost’. Russian Communism is a travesty of ‘sobornost,’ inasmuch as it subjects the creative freedom of man to the demands of a collectivized and mechanized society. And the Russians go on dreaming of ‘sobornost’ which would embody the integral unity of freedom and communion in religious, social, political and cultural relations.

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Steven Marks’ How Russia Shaped the Modern World includes cultural as well as political developments in making a convincing case for its titular claim. Marks acknowledges that the Russian influence has been, shall we say, a mixed blessing, but he nonetheless insists it has been substantial:

Anxiously searching for alternatives to the rationalism, materialism, or hegemony of the West, a portion of humanity turned to Russia for inspiration. Through its charismatic calls to justice, the creative genius of its artists and writers, and its extremist and utopian rejection of the West, Russia helped to configure some of the pivotal features of the modern era. Its thinkers bred a bewildering array of political arrangements and cultural expressions, constructive and destructive, entertaining and vile, positive and negative. All were manifestations of the antimodern rebellious mood that was prevalent among large segments of the world’s intelligentsias. What Russian ideas offered them was a way of either rejecting the contemporary world altogether or following a non-Western path to modernity…more often than not, radicals everywhere responded to the Russians’ programmatic critique of Western modernity in like fashion, with ambivalence, if not revulsion, toward capitalism, imperialism, and liberal politics.

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Finally, a non-Russia-related item: it appears I am not alone in my quest to understand the notion of “spirit” or, as it is sometimes called, “soul”. John Cottingham, for one, has written an entire book on the subject, In Search of the Soul; he also offers, at Aeon, a brief essay suggesting that—all spookiness, supernaturalism, and metaphysics aside—“soul” is shorthand for “our true selves, the selves we were meant to be. This is what the search for the soul amounts to; and it is here, if there is a meaning to human life, that such meaning must be sought.”

That’s all well and good, but we shouldn’t let Cottingham off the hook so easily—he has, after all, smuggled teleology into his explanation (“the selves we were meant to be”) without explaining its basis. Who, or what, decided or decides what we were “meant to be” or that we were even “meant to be” any particular “selves” at all? The idea that each of us has a “true self” we should try “to realize,” as Cottingham frames it, is incoherent without some teleological foundation, whether biological (as in Aristotle) or religious (as in Judeo-Christian belief).  

If we believe our very existence in the universe is mere accident; and if we therefore rule out all teleological claims; we can still say that “soul” stands for “the better angels of our nature”. Saying that doesn’t require us to believe in literal, supernatural “angels”; but it does compel us to grapple with what we mean by “our nature” and to weigh competing claims about what constitutes (or should constitute) “better”.

Deedle-deedle queep, as they say…