anglomedved

We were talking last night at supper about the Patriarch of Moscow’s concerns to keep the Communist period (1917 to 1988) as an integral part of Russian history, something not to be hidden with shame or disdain.

I found myself, a bit surprisingly, defending the Patriarch. By comparison with what happened in Germany in the years after WW2.

Both countries had had regimes (in Russia communist, in Germany national-socialist), which were widely viewed as harmful to mankind. With the collapse of these regimes there was a call for ‘repentance’ and ‘conversion’ to political and social cultures closer to those of the winners (in particular that of the USA).

I would argue that Germany lost a culture in the process, and a good part of its soul, and is poorer for the process. Yes, it quickly recovered a certain sense of purpose (at least in its western part) pouring its energy in the 1950s and 1960s into reconstruction and from the 1970s onwards into business, in which it knocked its former victors into a corner (typified by the rapid falls of both the dollar and the pound sterling against the German mark). But something had gone. I note this in particular in its language and literature: until the 1950s it was a full language, rich, creative, self-sufficent and could convey culturally refined content. Today neither language (often English with German words) or culture convince.

While the relationship between Christianity and nationalism is a fraught one, with ‘national’ churches to easily press-ganged for regime politics, I would argue that any country which wants to maintain some sort of identity will have to find a religious or quasi-religious structure for this. Supporting nationalism many not be seen by the church as its primary role, but if a church wants to exist within a reasonably stable social structure, it will probably have to provide at least minimal support. 

National histories are also like personal histories. Even when personal histories seem to go horribly off the rails, there rema                ins the original person, whom we have to try and disinter and continue to believe in despite all. And it is the same with cultures. They can go wrong, and get abused, but need to be preserved. Germany’s wasn’t. I rather hope the Russian one will survive. And I rather hope the Russian Church will play its part.

I am far from sure that either Russia or its church always get it right, but I remain grateful for a contrary voice, within the traditional Christian cultural area, that questions the often shallow, unsatisfactory and all-invading culture which Anglo-European economic and political powers-that-be want to impose on us.

Murder is murder and there is no excuse.

That being said:

-          I am very far from sure that the freedom to drag other people’s religious beliefs through the dirt, especially those of a sizeable minority community, which was one of Charlie-Hebdo's marks-in-trade, is a mark of real civilization in any country. Of freedom perhaps, but of civilization no. There is, I suspect, in certain quarters, a dangerous tendency to equate the two.

-          The causes of immigration are many, but a declining birth rate is a key one. A society (or a part of it) whose values put careers higher than having children will need to import outsiders to keep going. Outsiders entering in this situation enter in a position of strength: to expect them to lap up the values of the host society, and especially the a-religious, consumerist mindset of its elites, is illusory.

 

Прежде всего моим регулярным русским корреспондентам – Николаю, Павлу, Наталье, Ирине, о. Антонию, Владимиру, Игорю и другим,

А также тем многим, с кем я провел незабываемый месяц на Севере России этим летом:  особенно Глебу, кто дал мне такую возможность, и другим, с кем я познакомился в Пиньгише, Цельском и Нюнежской : Илье (ещё раз спасибо за фотографии), Алексею, Даше, Саше, Павлу, Софии, Алёше, Яне, Андрею, Владимиру, Маше, Даниле, Сергею и Вите. Для меня это была уникальная возможность увидеть уголок России, до которого я иначе вряд ли добрался бы. Спасибо вам всем! Жду фильма о нашей работе и приключениях!

Всем вам счастливых Рождественских праздников, и здоровья, успехов и радости в новом 2015 году. Бог даст, мы снова увидимся, в России или в Бельгии.

At the last class before the Christmas break our woodwork teacher expressed his concern about falling standards at the school.

I strongly sympathize. He came into the profession the old way, about 25 years ago: as a 14 year-old youth under a strict teacher of the old school. The kept their tools sharp, their benches repaired and learned to do everything by hand before moving onto machines. This has gone: on the day courses a lot of pupils are there under protest – they have to train in order to qualify for unemployment benefit, and the results, which you see lying round the workshop, are not brilliant. The evening courses are really too short, with not enough workshop practice really to get a feel for wood and the machinery.

All this chimes into the second reason why I took the course and am still on it (70% attrition so far): it is the experience of ‘apprenticeship’ in the good sense: that of slowly learning a skill over a time from a master. And if you start at 14, like our teacher did, it is a whole structured reference framework which you grow up in. Cutting and planing wood accurately and getting furniture to fit snug produces an attitude towards life which goes well beyond the workshop, including in particular the spiritual life.

Something is telling me louder and louder that we have got it wrong, or that it is going wrong. I mean the system we generally sell as ‘European values’.

It is like over recent months I have been constantly catching snatches of another song, with a beat that penetrates deeper than the daily musical diet of the last sixty odd years:

- From reading various German authors up to about 1960 (Jünger, Wiechert, Andres), all born before WWI, I get strains of another, older value system, that has been nearly smothered out of existence. Essentially ‘aristocratic’, at times unashamedly elitist, with a deep sense of honour and loyalty, and its moral code closely linked into the established church.

- I pick it up also in the traditional Spanish system, for example from the accounts of the family of the late Belgian Queen Fabiola. Historically it was monarchist and anti-Republican and welcomed Franco’s putsch of 1936, even if it and the Franquist regime kept each other at a cautious distance.

- I pick it up in the traditionalist Catholics of the Society of Pius X (Lefevrists), which seems to have made particular inroads into the French aristocracy, many of whose more Catholic members may be more in favour of Le Pen (the French far right leader) than they would want to say publicly.

- I am getting it from Russia, whose propaganda machine is making a pretty good job of making European values look spineless and unfocused, a society in which a basic human right is to have no values.

Against this what we seem to have in Western Europe right now is a system that, while it works well in terms of economic goods , general law and order and bureaucratic efficiency, fails to meet a deeper hunger. You can talk about a missing religious element if you want. Yes, the Christian church has been talking for the past 40 years of the need to reevangelize, as church congregations wither. But it has preached a distinctly individual Christianity, missing out on a basic human need for religion at a group and identity-giving level.

I am beginning to think that this need for a ‘religious’ foundation to society is something fundamental to the way we are and are meant to function, and we neglect this at our peril. This is something the European political establishment is really scared about: with memories of Hitler, Mussolini and Degrelle, it does not want mass movements which get out of its control (demagogy is a top ‘fear word’ for this class), is unhappy at certain of the moral dictates that such a mass movement will call far (stronger emphasis on family, stricter abortion laws, keeping LGBT activity off the streets) and has the problem of avoiding such a movement turning into immigrant or gay-bashing. Modern Christian theology too has a problem with religion at this level, as it means concentrating much of the energy of one’s elite on maintaining a broad-based religion, inevitably in some sort of inter-action with the powers-that-be, that keeps religion on a very ‘low’ level, with a constant danger of being used for political ends. For these theologians, Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 AD was a major wrong turn.

I am beginning to think, that if we are ever to have a credible shared value system in Europe, we are going to have to go back and reevaluate our history. We will need first to look again at society as it existed before the 1914-1918 cataclysm, the last period of relatively stable values, for the most part couched in religious language, and see what we can learn. But in particular, we will have to look very hard indeed at the period 1918 to 1945, a period of strong clashes of values, and ask whether the post-war solution settlement we had in Western Europe, and which now extends to most of the rest of Europe, was and remains, the best one.  The big problem is that one of the strongest movements in the interbellum period with a sense of value, in particular with both a society-wide and religious aspect to it, was fascism. This was essentially proscribed in the post-war settlement (Spain and Portugal, where it continued were too off-centre and poor to matter). My own personal reading of the Third Reich is that Hitler and (perhaps more Goebels) smelled the spiritual vacuum that existed with the fall of the German Imperial system. Anyone who has read Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf or Ernst Wiechert’s Ein einfaches Leben will sense what I mean. Read or watch the film newsreels of Hitler’s or Goebels’ speeches and you realize that they are speaking straight into this vacuum. Today I fear this vacuum is being filled by consumerism and easy sex.

This blanket proscription of fascism may, in my view, have been a mistake.

There are, I believe, two spiritual principles involved here. The first is that the spiritually very right and the spiritually very wrong are often very close: when something is spiritually good the Evil One will make serious attempts to pervert it (as someone said: ‘The devil never pays his own taxi’), second that when fighting and defeating something spiritually wrong, one must take great care not to throw out the good with the bad. My hypothesis is that there was potentially something deeply right in the movement that brought the Nazis, the Fascists and the Falange into power, that the Evil one went hard for it, and perverted it, causing enormous bloodshed, but that in rebuilding society after 1945, a lot of good got thrown out with the bad. Now, nearly seventy years on, it may be time to ask again in Europe what was both good and bad in these movements, and then whether there is any way of keeping this good with solid safeguards against the bad. If you like, a form of social being that combines a sense of pride in being, a sense of duty to society and social purposefulness, minus concentration camps, gas ovens and master-race language. Something with a sense of the ‘aristocratic’ in the best sense of the term, without being limited to inherited title or wealth.

I suspect also that this is the question that, in a different language, the Russian church and the power structures close to it are asking.

Today was the funeral in Brussels of Queen Fabiola, who died last Friday at the age of 86. A deeply Christian ceremony for a very deeply Christian woman, whom many would like to see canonized sooner or later with her husband, the late King Baudouin.

We are a small country, and in the Christian community you know people: I met the Queen myself only once, no more than a shake hands, but through a mutual Christian friend knew discreetly how ill she had been. The queen knew of our icon-painting studio and had spoken of visiting, the icon on display at her lying in state was painted by my wife. The dean of the Cathedral where the funeral took place is a friend, and I have spoken at one time or another to many of the clergy involved in the ceremony.

I have watched about four times today the DVD ‘Orthodox Christianity in the British Islands’, introduced by Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, originally produced last year in Russian and now to be reedited with English subtitles (my job to check them).

I have not yet quite worked who is the real target audience for the film, nor why the Russian Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication helped pay. But leaving that aside, the DVD is tastefully done, the historical information given is accurate (bar one howler), and the subtitles sensitively written in British (as distinct from Russian) English. I had to look hard to find bits to correct.

A good half of the film is devoted to the three ‘giants’ that, to quote the blurb: ‘England gave to Orthodoxy’, the late Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh , the late Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia. And indeed the best bits are precisely little snippets of the Metropolitan’s personal experience of all three men when still a humble student, including his tactful handling of the fact that Antony and Sophrony were very far from friends….

In total these take up no more than 5 minutes of a 44 minute film: two bishops, four priests and just one layman. The latter is a very well-introduced member of the London upper set, close to the British court, now a trustee of the Russian cathedral and filmed In his London club, a charming man (I know him personally) but hardly a ‘simple parishioner’.

If I was had to subtitle the film it would be either ‘England through Russian spectacles’, or less kindly, the ‘history of our British cocoon’.

History because the film looks backwards rather than forwards. Two out of the three ‘great’ figures are dead, the third just celebrated his 80^th birthday (though I of course wish him many more).  One of the big temptations of Orthodoxy outside its home countries is to live too long on its past, re-editing books and talks spiritual giants of twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, rather than encouraging a new generation of spiritual men. ‘Paris Orthodoxy’ made this fatal mistake, so, I suspect did the Russian Church outside Russia. Orthodoxy in Britain is in danger of going the same way. Certainly, of the three ‘greats’ mentioned, only one, to my knowledge (Sophrony) has produced a worthy successor, who is continuing the tradition (Archimandite Zacharias).

Cocoon, because the film gives the impression of a very closed and separate world, very much outside the mainstream of both English church life and, despite all the very ‘British’ shots (Queen, Prince Charles, Tower Bridge, horses in Hyde Park), of English life in general. Much of the comment on existing English Christianity, and in particular the Church of England, is the eternal Russian lament against gay marriage and female priests and bishops. Yes, I understand this, but somehow I feel that if someone in England is going to have again the effect that either Metropolitan Antony or Archimandrite Sophrony had, they have got to come at things from another angle. For me these are symptoms of a malaise, not their root causes. And good spirituality, by its very definition, goes for root causes.

Somehow, though perhaps I shouldn’t say so, the Pope’s message to the European Parliament yesterday (http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/november/documents/papa-francesco_20141125_strasburgo-parlamento-europeo.html)  left me a bit cold. It fails to provide the momentum we need to get Europe really meaning something. While the founders of the European Union – Schumann, Gaspari, Adenauer and De Gaulle, were deeply Christian men, the idea of the European Union as a spiritual force – and perhaps the idea of ‘spiritual force’ at all in Europe, petered out somewhere in the late 70s. Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995,  a Christian if ever there was one, basically threw in the towel on uniting Europe on any spiritual basis, and realized the only way to do it was on a basis of mutual economic advantage, in particular of a shared currency.

If you asked me to draw in picture form what the Europe the Pope seems to be aiming at, it looks rather like a big, lower-class barbecue party, or street festival (the Notting Hill Carnival more decently clad and without the gays). Sorry, but that does not spark me.

One of the things we dare not say too loud in Europe is that the leaders who ‘sparked’ people most and got things moving in the last 100 years, were the fascists, not the democrats. In the best of the movements (Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary) there was a sense of pride, of nationhood, or readiness to prefer common cause to individual advantage, a sense of something higher, something greater.  And a certain sense of élite. Yes, it went too far, but in our desperation to avoid any trace of it, we have become flat and mundane. It is this lost sense, incidentally, that Russian propaganda towards Europe is playing to, dangerously and well.

For the past year or more I have been either translating or correcting some fifty or so texts for a ‘World Book of Faith’ to be published next year in English by a Belgian editor. It follows on an earlier World Book of Happiness and a World Book of Love. In my view it is better than either.

The texts come from Christian, Islam as well as Hindu and Buddhist and Confucian sources, with the odd Wicca thrown in for good measure, and include both big names (for Christianity: Metropolitan Hilarion Alfayev and Prior Enzo Bianchi) and smaller fry.

The great majority of texts express for me an honest attempt to come to terms with the ‘mysterium tremendum’ of that which is greater than ourselves and exercises a call on our lives. Most of the writing comes from the edge, rather than the centre of organized religion, which is probably a good thing. The two or three which gave me trouble were the Christian ones where I sense the Christian message of ‘love God and love your brother’ has elided into ‘love God in your brother’. The standing naked before one’s creator, and the readiness to be turned inside out by him have gone by the board. Instead of this deep conversion we have a ‘reframing’ of Christianity as ‘do good to your neighbour and feel guilty about living in a society that is richer than others’. I am not saying that Christianity does not command us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but if it no more than that, it is no more than enlightened humanism, and there is no need to go to church or fight with God. Which is indeed what has happened, particular in northern European Protestantism. Put at its harshest: if you cannot feed people’s souls, and give them something to live for beyond themselves and their neighbours, it probably makes precious little sense feeding their stomachs.

At the opening session of the Worldwide Russian National Council last Tuesday (http://ria.ru/religion/20141111/1032786988.html) Patriarch Kirill of Moscow defined how he would like to synthesize Russian identity out of his country’s Russian history and carry it forward, with the formula ‘faith, justice, solidarity, dignity, great power’ "вера, справедливость, солидарность, достоинство, державность".

I have two questions:

One: Is it right for a religious leader to be using the term ‘great power’? I have to be careful not to throw stones: Archbishops of Canterbury used similar language during the British Empire (1), and Churchill’s relation to God was , I suspect, rather similar to Vladimir Putin’s looks to me to be, as a useful part of the country’s psychological armoury. And it seems to me theologically acceptable to suggest that the way one nation runs its affairs, the ‘mores’ by which the body of its people, starting with its ruling and political class, can be superior or inferior to that of another. Most of us would place Germany or England – or indeed Russia - ‘higher’ than Colombia or Tajikistan. Indeed am not against saying that a particular nation or faith may have a ‘high calling’ to set an example to the world: but by moral persuasion, not by force and certainly not by dirty behaviour away from the cameras. National pride has, though, taken some countries down some dreadfully negative paths, externally and internally: Germany and Japan being the most obvious examples, and the record of the USA is more than ambiguous here. And yes, ‘power’ does not fit very well with the Gospel, as least as we interpret it here in the west.

Two: What place does the concept of ‘freedom’ take in the identity that Patriarch Kirill is looking for? This concept is central to Western politico-religious thought – indeed it is on this search for ‘freedom’, so the myth goes, that the United States was founded, largely by deeply believing people. While as a Christian I can do without a lot of what is actually very superficial and ‘unfree’ freedom, true freedom (“whose service is perfect freedom”) remains for me a deep God-implanted longing, and an essential part of the Christian message. When it comes to Russia I sense a deep ambiguity and paradox: no one is going to tell me that organized Christianity in Russia is ‘free’; from what I have seen of it it is miserably unfree: and yet on the same hand many Russians I know (especially lay people) reach a spiritual depth and inner freedom which I have rarely found elsewhere. It may be that ‘freedom’ passes first through ‘unfreedom’ (certainly in mystical theology it does) and we are wrong in the west to leave our young people too early with too many options and no sense of meaning. But I would still prefer to reduce Kirill’s pentatych to a triptych ‘justice, solidarity, dignity’, leave ‘faith’ to the individual and put ‘great power’ on the shelf.

(1)    See the YouTube Clip of like Archbishop Temple in 1944 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e84CMrW1vA – jump to minutes 17, or the language of the newsreel presenter in the last minute of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOsSjVvGvRY).