The Aesthetics of Civility: Art and Counterrevolution

By Fr. Matthew Raphael Johnson, Ph.D.

Originally Published in Modern Age, Spring 2000

Art is a microcosm of civilization. If, as Plato was to say, justice consists in a certain ordering of parts according to their nature, then art is an idealization of this arrangement, one anticipating its coming into being. Pieces of the whole are found naturally there, manifesting themselves as such a part. An aesthetic manifesting the idea of justice is the human intellect striving to realize the pieces of a whole subsumed under the concept of justice itself. Both the parts and the whole are shown as manifesting what they truly are. Art, as Plato would not say, is an understanding of justice as an idealization of the real. These are two quite distinct things. The former is the anticipation of the Good under the medium of an artistic expression. The expression itself takes its beginning from the concept of justice itself. The latter takes its starting point from the real, from natural objects and states of affairs. By “idealization” one means the concept of justice itself, a concept immortalized in the definition of Logos, or the arrangement of elements forming a whole. Art seeks the elements of justice within natural objects, and attempts to bring out its defining features in ways currently not socially grasped. Artistic creation is the ability to see potential for further ethical growth in the natural and social order. It is the realization of essence, if only in symbolic form. Art can find no separation from this. Art apart from the Logos is degeneracy.

The lack of vision in modern art is one of the most painful and most obvious signs of American and Western social collapse. It is such that even the most untrained minds can see the lack of any hope in society’s most subtle modes of self-expression. Art is a window to society, and much can be learned through an examination of art, or the collective social expression. Much is learned about social cohesion and collective values through art. Classical Byzantium and its successor state, Imperial Russia —perhaps two of the most healthy societies in world history—expressed themselves in that antithesis of decadence, iconography. Iconography is the aesthetic of counterrevolution. Even at the start of the “Enlightened” revolution with Thomas Hobbes and the Renaissance (of which he was the intellectual apogee), art had an evocative nature, even a transformative one. However fleshy, sensual, and hyper- realistic, Gothia showed mankind at its essence, in a powerful relationship with the Creator of all things —humanity, that is, as reaching fulfillment only in such a relationship. Mankind’s essence as a rational being is actualized only in communion with its creator. Religious art was the poetry of the soul, in that it could transcend the mundane and show mankind’s final resting place. This was the repose of the human soul, and poetry could capture it as theological speculation never could. This is the aesthetic of the liturgy, and even of scripture itself.

After the great El Greco attempted the fusion of the icon with Western realism—certainly one of the greatest experiments in art history—the residual transcendent understanding of art had a rather short life. As liberalism and utilitarianism took over the realm of ethics, art no longer had any metaphysical base from which to proceed. Decadence and decay were soon to follow.

If art is the expression of the Logos, or the arrangement of elements in a whole according to the fullness of their essence, then modernity was the death of art. The ideology of modernity declared that essences were non-existent. Following the ideas of the English Schoolman, William of Occam, Enlightenment philosophy considered objects as merely a bundle of properties. An essence was merely something invented by the observer to make sense out of the properties themselves, to bring unity to that which was brought to the senses. Essences had no independent existence. There were no “objects” strictly considered, but merely an understanding of universal causality. There was no central purpose to man, the human intellect was reduced to a bundle offeelings and impulses. No art worthy of the name can proceed from such a psychology.

It was mankind, according to Francis Bacon and John Locke, that was to impart meaning to objects, rather than science being a study of objects in themselves. Rationality, vis-à-vis a just social order, concerned the scientific establishment applying the understanding of universal causality to the social realm—the birth of the social sciences, reaching its apogee in Comte. The concept of a social science was the elite arrangement of social entities (self-moving pieces of matter idealized into “human beings”) in such a way that the response to stimuli was to lead the entities in the preordained direction —it was the social planners who were to define justice, and, if the human intellect was a fiction, then all that was needed was a skillful manipulation of sentiments and impulses. The greatest and most unfortunate expression of this idea is within the pages of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651).

The effect on aesthetics was nothing short of revolutionary. With the concept of an object fully expressing its essence now dissipated in Enlightenment social science, objects were merely to reflect the moods and drives of the viewer. Classical art was not something that essentially extended from the intellect of the artist, or, more accurately, the sentiments and “will to power” of the artist, but from the object itself, the object expressing an intrinsic essence through the medium of the intellect.

That essence being fully actualized in direct communion with God is the very aesthetic of iconography, reflecting faithfully the philosophy of a fully Christian social order as well as a Christian psychology. The iconographer, usually a monastic, would fast for extended periods of time before attempting to capture this concept. Fasting was to release the spirit at the expense of the flesh, bringing the artist into a fuller communion with the essence of all essences, pure being itself, God. This is the aesthetics of the spirit, the aesthetics of Christian civilization.

Enlightenment social science created an aesthetic that merely reflected the drives of the artist, for there was no essence to be actualized, no spirit to soar above the ever earthbound flesh. Art became the “idealization” of the piece of matter-in-motion of the Leviathan. Mankind was expressed in art, eventually, as the tortured and imprisoned bundle of passions at the mercy of drives. Soon, this idea was to reach its fullness in the Existentialist school; that school of thought that still haunts Western man to this day. Art and music began to express dread and fear. Mankind had no purpose and the universe was absurd, but man was still forced to make moral judgments, still forced to live in society and cherish his pathetic modicum of earthly contentment.

There can be no question, with exceptions such as Goya, that the Enlightenment ushered in the age of decadence in aesthetics. No longer was the human form illumined from outside, but humanity was seen, following the Weltgeist of scientism, to possess this for itself, as itself. This myth was not to last long. Mankind, quite the contrary from proving it was the bearer of the “divine spark,” showed that it was capable of the basest evil. Such ideas came into painfully sharp focus as World War I began.

Artistic creation was to become blurrier and blurrier as humanity was severed from any transcendent purpose. By the end of the nineteenth century, van Gogh, Sickert, Seurat, Prikker, van de Velde, and so many others had severed humanity from its origin—and, explicitly so, had Gauguin. Mankind was not renewed, as in classical iconography and sculpture, but distorted, taken away from its transcendent origin and place of repose; the human form became the plaything of arbitrary will. Art became the idealization of the bureaucracy. Ovid’s Metamorphosis had reasserted itself in the age of the social sciences. The onslaught of Comte, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, as well as their famous predecessors such as de Sade and LeMettrie, posited man not only as lacking purpose and ethical basis, but subject to forces beyond human control. Humanity became something to administer, to regulate, to place in arbitrary units for its own good. This culminated in the communes of Paris and in the collectivization of the Soviet period.

The will of the artist imitated the will of the bureaucrat and the will of the industrialist. The structures of modern social science replaced the human essence as the final resting place of artistic creation. If

mankind was to be manipulated according to its passions, impulses, and drives (the only realities in modern psychology), then it became an inevitability that art reflected the powers of the new order. Art Deco became the symbol of bureaucratic art, the art of the social scientist, the aesthetic expression of John Dewey and John Maynard Keynes.

World War I, of course, eliminated the human form altogether, giving birth to a true Existentialism, one that is still the official creed of the modern mass man. The destruction of the aristocracy, by those who protected classical culture (in, however, a vulgar fashion), came simultaneously with the destruction of the human form in aesthetics. It was just a few years until Picasso distorted the human form by following the ebb and flow of his own libido—the very apogee of arbitrary, that is, non-rational, will in art. E. Michael Jones, in his Degenerate Moderns, clearlyshows Picasso as merely being the reflection of his own sexual lust and extremely short attention span.

The connection with Enlightenment—and Existentialist—metaphysics should be clear. The manipulation of the properties of the human form, truly the only relevant subject of artistic creation given the demise of the human essence (or the human form in the highest sense), became the only purpose of artistic creation, reflecting fully the bureaucratization of social life in accord with the final victories of the social sciences and their patron, the techno-bureaucratic and industrialized state. As masses of humanity were herded to death in war and into the factories, art reflected this new reality in the lifeless and meaningless depictions of mankind. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) became one of the greatest artistic creations of social protest, both affirming and denying human freedom and the human intellect, depicting a mankind that both loved and hated freedom, or the idea that mankind possesses an intellect.

On the other side of the canvas, art was exemplified by the drives and carnal desires of the artist. The Enlightenment had won and mankind was now completely a material object, a purposeless, functionless blob of desires and passions meant to be shaped into a harmonious whole by the scientist and the bureaucrat. Art had followed the new idea of mankind as well as the new idea of justice.

All of this falls into the perennial danger of the essayist, that is, a stultifying simplicity, and one that I admit. A solid essayist, however, is interested in essences, not in chronology. I notice one interesting thing, however. As the human form was gradually destroyed between 1890 and 1918—though the origins go back at least to the early Enlightenment—the concept of sculpture remained highly realistic and romantic, with horrible exceptions like Rosso. People like von Hildebrand and Gerome did maintain a classical understanding of sculpture. Dalou in sculpture and Liszt in music may well have found a second but not entirely unrelated spur to the glorification of the human form in the idea of the nation.

Dalou’s Triumph of the Republic (1899), however much it included that prostitute “goddess” of reason at its head (the ever present revolutionary symbol and a mockery of human rationality, and indeed its death sentence), finds its clarity in the idea of the nation. Hegel’s concept of the nation as the divine- historical manifested on earth, or the concept in all its terrestrial fullness, may have well breathed new life into the concept of humanity and its eternal purpose. The idea of the nation, particularly in its more conservative aspects, created a super- reason of the national patrimony. It created a new man, the nation, or the collective man, from which art could spring. One must understand, however, that even this was not to last. The wars of the twentieth century put an end to that.

We need look no further than Picabia’s Girl Born Without a Mother (1915) to find the final guttering out of Western aesthetics. Mankind has completely become a machine, and the traditions of the past no longer existent for European humanity. The lack of a “mother” was not only the lack of an intelligible patrimony but also the consummation—long anticipated by Hobbes—of fear into a fundamental idea of human life. This fear was the fear of Existentialism: the existence of moral ideas in a person supposed

to be merely material; the absurdist contradiction between mankind as allegedly material with the idea that mankind can consider the future. This was the fundamental contradiction of modernism and the fullest explanation of the fear that gripped twentieth-century man—reflected faithfully by the Existentialists. It finally took Toorop and Brauner to view humans—including themselves—as corpses, or at least as possessing a corpse-like countenance. Mankind without an essence, mankind without a final and transcendent purpose, mankind as being merely a bundle of properties (externally) and a bundle of passions (internally) showed itself to the artist as form without a life, function without a purpose. The corpse became the living symbol of Enlightenment philosophy through its art.

The simple fact of meaning here is that modernity has made it intolerable to be human; Existentialism itself quickly followed upon the debris of the broken promises of modern science. The promises of the Enlightenment—well-placed by Goya and others—went unfulfilled as science failed to impart meaning to the human community. Science was never to replace what classical philosophy had, without exception, understood: an intrinsic meaning and purpose to the human function and form, or an understanding of function through the form.

Socialist realism rediscovered the human form buttressed by ideology, but art on orders from the state cannot be interpreted except through the demands of the state system itself, and contains nothing but the ever present demands for propaganda only. Indeed, art in the twentieth century reflected the socialist school in that it was a product of the New Order of mass capital and state manipulation. The proof of this can be found in the dragooning of art into the service of mass advertising, reflecting, in the most vulgar way imaginable, a mankind that the scientific class considered as merely a tool for the enrichment of mass capital and as cannon-fodder for the newly formed and entrenched total warfare state.

Socialist realism understood the classical function of art much better than the various schools at the time. For Marxism, art was the reaching for human justice, a fullness of man’s “being”—a “being” that was entirely self-created through the various new technologies. It stood to reason, however, that once “paradise” had come to earth, art lost its function; it was merely to report what it had seen, for there was nothing to “idealize” since ideals were already manifested within the socialist state. Thus, ordinary human forms doing ordinary human things became the sole domain of artistic expression, in other words, socialism had claimed to have transcended art in bringing it into reality. The socialist state system, then, demanded the dissemination of “realism” in art to show, if nothing else, that the paradise had indeed arrived on earth. Socialist realism is a necessary outgrowth of socialist theory, and served not the reality of socialist life, but merely the demands for propaganda by the socialist elite.

What, then, is the aesthetic of counterrevolution? It is the perennial aesthetic of the icon. What makes this the rock of anesthetics—a true aesthetic of civility—is its vision of human destiny, a final repose outside of earthly desires and fleshly passions. It was the eros of Plato rather than the erotica of Picasso. Humanity does not contain its “own light,” as the neo-gnostic Enlightenment assured us; nor does science have the ability to recreate the “divine spark” in its own image. The classical aesthetic of the apostolic Christian world is that humanity, first, is fallen, and, second, is capable, through communion with the Creator, of recapturing the glory of his nature manifested to the fullest extent. This is the aesthetic of iconography. The psychology of iconography is to be found in the final victory of the spirit (or the upper reaches of the intellect in Orthodox Christian theology) over the flesh. This victory is not found in the radical suppression of the flesh, as the ancient gnostics taught, but rather in that fundamentally Orthodox notion of the transfiguration of the flesh.

What Plato understood, in spite of himself, was that the flesh was an intrinsic part of the human person. His view of justice was not the elimination of the flesh, but rather its being brought into subjection to powers that are naturally superior to it. The spirit and intellect were, by nature, superior to the flesh in that they could generalize about natural contingency and understand the universal hidden therein. Only

then could the flesh find its proper function in the world. The passions, or the active principle of the flesh, were not to be eliminated, but placed in the service of the intellect. This is the psychology of civility, and was productive of an artistic vision that idealized the final victory of the spirit.

One must, however, not forget the idea of the nation. The very concept of the Christian collective, reinforced by its national idea, is the true spur for considering the eventual human glorification in the super-nation of heaven. Following Vladimir Soloviev, artistic beauty is the divine light penetrating the material humanity. One can extrapolate, first, the idea of the nation as the material condition for the divine penetration, collectively speaking, of divine grace, and second, the Christian society as its light. The life of the nation, in other words, can be transformed by the church, and society can become actually Christian. Christian society takes on the look of a large church, and it is the light of Mount Tabor that makes a nation a theological organization rather than merely a mundane one, as Saint Augustine taught.

This is to say that, if the entire collective is transformed, there is no object of nature that cannot be considered transfigured, and thus, a thing of beauty. Beauty for those like Soloviev and the classical tradition in general follows from the Holy Transfiguration of Christ. Art represents the transfiguration of nature. It is not the slavish imitation of nature, nor is it its nullification, but rather its fulfillment. This is the purpose of art, this is the artistic genius. Justice, then, is the Christianization of the collective because only it can redeem man from his intrinsic fallenness, manifested by the predominance of human passion and impulse. Justice follows from the Transfiguration, for only when the flesh of man and his community is transformed can mankind live as he should, according to his essence.

But if nature is to be receptive of this transformation, then the collectivity itself must be transformed. This is to say that the society in general must be dedicated to manifesting the supremacy of the spiritual and intellectual over the carnal. The Christian nation, then, becomes a work of art, for it is the transfiguration of social life. It is the idealization of the famous seal of the Byzantine Empire, or the two-headed eagle, the joining of the mundane to the spiritual in one transformative and transformed unity, the highest aspiration of social theory.

Even the architecture of the church itself speaks of the idea of the Transfiguration. The church itself, in its state closest to the ground, or the earth, is square. This represents the mundane world with its boundaries, pain, limitations. Above it and expressing a unity with the square is the dome, and within it, the icon of the Pantocrator, the creator and maintainer of all things. The divine circle rests upon the human square. The circle transforms the limitations of the mundane world, making pain and limitation necessary ingredients to one’s spiritual transformation, itself a precursor to the final glorification of the church in heaven. The altar itself is always a square (tetrapod), while the body of Christ, offered upon it, is in the form of bread baked in a circle. The circle has no beginning or end, while the square is well defined by its intrinsic limitations.

The lack of the rational state of justice—the transformed human collective—is the end of artistic creation worthy of the name. If the collective is not dedicated to this state of affairs, or the spiritualization of the collective, then nature cannot be seen as transfigured, but merely as the object of human desire. This is the very definition of decadence and is the ground for abstraction—or the nullification of nature—in artistic creation. Nature is “conquered” by the spirit and made to be seen anew, as expressing value in itself. Outside of this, nature is viewed as Locke viewed it, merely a means to mankind’s passions.

Nature can be three things in artistic representation: abstract, real, or transfigured. Imitating nature as it is makes little sense—no one needs an artist for this, but merely eyes. This is the art of socialist realism that claims that idealization is unnecessary because the ideal is now the real. Abstraction is the view of nature as the object of technical manipulation, nature as nullified, subject to outside powers.

Transformation is the glorification, through the light of the Transfiguration, of nature to its original state, a state of cooperation, abundance, and humanness.

This is the meaning of art, and it has a spiritual as well as social component. The social life is to reflect the Church in its demand for the supreme rule of the spiritual and the intellectual, as the Church imparts the grace needed to make this a reality, not a part of the dreams of the Platonists or the Stoa. The church is the true spur to art in its fullness in that it is the mystical body of Christ itself, thus redeeming us from our base passions. Humanity can finally be represented in its wholeness, in its place of repose. In classical times this ideal existed, but remained a distant object of speculation, something Plato painfully took to his grave. There was no “bridge” between the current passionate state of humanity and the ideal of the rational life. This is, further, the aesthetic of counterrevolution, the art of anti-decadence, the art against carnality.

Simply put, then, art is about transformation, collective as well as natural. The Christian nation is an icon of heaven, as the monarch is the icon of Christ; it is the transformation of collective life. Art seeks to capture this transformation and present it to those who find difficulty in comprehending a mass transformation as a theological matter. Christian faith, in its highest and most complete expression, is a collective phenomenon; when it becomes an individual phenomenon solely, the end of Christian society is near if not present. The nation has, in both East and West, been the repository of the Christian collective. Its health—as Blessed Augustine was to say—is the health of the Church. Both are necessary to the transformation of human life, and thus, to the existence of true art. The light of Tabor enlightens and transfigures the collective life as the national expression encourages all to acts of penance and repentance. Christianity does not exist with a series of monasteries or hermitages alone, but as a vibrant collective phenomenon in the nation taking on the externals of a Church in itself. The nation participates within the mystical body of Christ on earth, and is not something foreign to it. This is the beginning of transfiguration, and also the impetus to aesthetics. It is the aesthetics of civility, the aesthetics of the new man.

Who was Rasputin?

Matthew Raphael Johnson - Who was Rasputin?

A Review of Rasputin: Neither Devil nor Saint, by Dr. Elizabeth Judas

Of all the topics in Russian history that have interested me over the years, few were as mysterious as the relations between the Royal family and Gregory Rasputin. I knew a few things: first, that the tsarevich was sick with hemophilia, and Rasputin had some sort of ability to heal him. Second, I knew that Rasputin had some influence over policy. And third, I knew that Rasputin had little control over his libido. With this information, I began to dig deeper into the life of this mysterious man. Unfortunately, I began to realize just a quickly, that what I thought I knew about Rasputin was false.

Up until recently, revisionist material on Rasputin was very scarce. Among the patriotic elements in Russian society prior to the revolution, only the royal family itself seemed to have any use for him. Outside of a few rather sectarian circles presently in Russia, Orthodox people either dismissed him, or condemned him as a fraud.

Recently, Liberty and Life publishing in California released a small book on the life of Rasputin from one who actually knew the man, a certain Dr. Elizabeth Judas, who was the wife of Alexander Ivanovich, an officer in the tsar’s secret service. Furthermore, the author’s uncle was a major figure in the imperial government. For years, this manuscript has lain rather undisturbed, out of print for decades and completely ignored by mainstream Russia scholarship. Alas, I myself, though immersing myself in Russian history and literature until it poured from my ears, had never heard of this manuscript, nor had any other revisionist writer in this field writing in English.

I was able to read this volume in two sittings. Now merely because it is short (216 pages in large fonts), but also because it is a gripping story. Nothing anyone has told you about Rasputin has even a shred of truth to it. Rasputin was a victim of revolutionary politics from without, and anti-tsarist palace intrigue from within. In the final analysis, this is the conclusion of this book.

***

Through a series of very interesting events, events that themselves tell much of local politics in the early part of the 20th century, the author, as a young child, met the acquaintance of Rasputin while living in Siberia, where she had many relatives. She knew Rasputin long before the tsar did. It was the author’s uncle, Dr. Lebikov, who first suggested to the royal family that this rather charismatic wanderer (Rasputin was not a priest, nor a monk, nor did he ever have a desire to be ordained or tonsured) from Siberia be brought to the palace to pray for the ailing tsarevich, Alexei. Now, the tsarevich was sick, he suffered from acute pains in his stomach, he never had hemophilia, nor is there any evidence of this serious disease among his medical records, or even within the correspondence between Nicholas and Alexandra, which, by the way, was conducted in English.

The distracted royal couple had no difficulty in permitting this Siberian religious man entrance into the palace. Though his appearance, with long hair and beard, wearing traditional Russian peasant dress, did cause a stir among the nobility at court, many of which were incensed to find such a commoner at the palace.

A few things need to be said about this. The great flaw in Nicholas’s reign was his inability to control the powerful and obnoxious nobility (including other more distant members of the Romanov clan). This was no easy task. Not only did Nicholas have certain familial responsibilities towards them, they also were possessed of political power in their own right, as well as access to substantial fortunes. Nicholas illustrious father, Alexander III succeeded in controlling this element, which is in part explanatory of why terror activity and revolutionary politics substantially subsided during his reign. Of course, Alexander was very different from his son, being much larger and more intimidating, Alexander personally often used physical coercion to control the more restless members of the clan. Nicholas was not of this temperament, being more refined than his father, but he eventually paid for his lack of a hard line in this matter.

Furthermore, Nicholas was a Slavophile: this means, in a nutshell, that Nicholas believed that Russia’s strength was in her peasantry, her agriculture, the commune and the church, all of which Nicholas was attached to not merely as a political figure, but also as a Russian man. To Nicholas, Rasputin represented the best in the Russian peasant: hardy, simple, pious. Rasputin made a powerful impression on the royal couple.

Rasputin was religiously opposed to the use of hypnosis or any sort of “mesmerism” in religious life; he made this clear to the author on many occasions. There is no evidence that he was a part of any sect that used these techniques, nor is there any proof he was even aware of their techniques apart from reputation. Rasputin was able to calm Alexei during his times of physical pain, and it was in this that his services were important. Rasputin did not cure Alexei of anything, but though prayer, was able to soothe the nerves of the young heir. He never took any credit for his services, saying only that God is responsible for the alleviation of Alexei’s pain. Nor did rasputin seek any reward for his services, and was very quick to leave the palace when he was no longer needed. In fact, it is worth nothing htat Rasputin routinely left the company of the royal family with intentions to go back to Siberia. It was only through the pleading of the royal couple that he returned. A rather curious form of behavior for someone who was “power mad.” In fact, twice, Rasputin packed up to leave for his native land, but was enticed back by Alexandra who clearly needed Rasputin to soothe the tsarevich.

Consulting eyewitnesses, there is no evidence that Rasputin had any political agenda whatsoever. There is substantial reason to doubt he was even a monarchist, though he respected the reigning royal family. The author claims that rasputin told her that praying for ht tsar was wrong, and only the poor and needy should be prayed for. However odd this statement might be, it hardly reflects any belief in royalism.

It did not take long for Rasputin to make enemies. The first sin he committed was to foil an assassination attempt on the heir to the throne. Apparently, several members of the palace nobility were ordering one of Alexei’s nurses to rub a certain powder on his rectum. The nurse was told that this was a medication brought back from the Middle East to treat Alexei’s condition. Rasputin, suspicious, asked that it be analyzed, only to discover that it was poison. As soon as this concoction was no longer applied, the tsarevich’s illness disappeared. There is no question, in Rasputin’s mind after this, that there was a cabal in the palace against the young heir. Rasputin’s days were numbered, and he knew it. But it was this incident that sealed the bond of trust between the royal family and Rasputin.

It didn’t help matters when a certain Prince Felix Yusapov approached Rasputin, asking him to intercede with the royal family for the oldest Romanov daughter’s hand. Rasputin, after being offered a bribe, refused. Eventually the story began to circulate, and Prince Yusapov moved to England to avoid further embarrassment. From there, Yusapov began to circulate stories about Rasputin at the English press. Among his accusations was that Rasputin was a Jew, that he had an out of control libido, and that he was an alcoholic. From this time on (about 1909), the stories about Rasputin began to get their start.

The murder of Rasputin is also treated in this book, but one with substantial revisionist material. It is normally told that Rasputin was killed after nearly every conceivable form of killing had failed: from poison to bullets to drowning to beatings. Rasputin was murdered by a group known as the “Mad Gang,” a group of extremely high ranking but also very liberal nobles and politicians who sought the eventual overthrow of Nicholas (and the monarchy in general) and their own installation in power. Among whom was Duma president Rodzianko, Vladimir Purishkevich, and Prince Yusipov. Apparently, according to later police reports, Rasputin was aware of the reason the liberal Prince Yusipov wanted him at his house, though the cover story was to pray for his ailing wife. In several confessions from Yusipov, he said that he first wanted to poison Rasputin, but he refused to eat the cakes especially prepared for him, nor the wine; all of which was poisoned. Eventually, he simply shot Rasputin, and eventually dumped his body into the river Neva, where, according to the autopsy, he died of drowning. It was a rather quick affair, bereft of the drawn out will to live so popular among cinematographers.

***

Much of the upper nobility in St. Petersburg was frankly being converted to liberalism as the 20th century got started. Many of them resented the traditionalism of the Emperor (though a traditionalism strongly tinged with practical good sense), and certainly, the presence of an “uneducated hick” at court. It might be mentioned that Rasputin was not uneducated, though he certainly had strong peasant roots.

Many of the nobility through their weight behind the liberal reformers, and, slowly but surely, the upper reaches of the nobility were turning against Nicholas. The Emperor was surrounded by turncoats and traitors, each viewing himself as the future president of a republican Russia, or even as the next Emperor. It reached a point where, except for a few trusted intimates, Nicholas was unsure who he could trust. Ultimately, it was Rasputin and Alexandra. As proof of this, here is the official exoneration of Rasputin made by the revolutionary Provisional Government (i.e. the anti-tsarist government under Kerensky, prior to the Bolshevik takeover) in July of 1917:

    19 July 1917

    This testimonial delivered to Mikhail Mihailovich Leibikov certifies that not a single indication of Gregory Rasputin’s political activity was disclosed by the High Commission of Inquiry. The inquiry into the influence of Rasputin on the Imperial Family was intensive but it was definitely established that that influence had its source only in the profound religious sentiment of their Majesties. The only favor Rasputin accepted was the rental of his lodging, paid by the personal Chancellor of his Majesty. He also accepted presents made by the hands of the Imperial Family, such as shirts, waist-bands, etc. That Rasputin had no connections with any foreign authorities. That all pamphlets and newspaper articles on the subject of Rasputin influence and other rumors and gossip were fabricated by the powerful enemies of the emperor. This statement is given under the signature and seal of the Attorney General of the High Commission.

    V.M. Rudnev (signature)

The fact is that the Provisional Government, set up after the formal abdication of the Tsar in 1917, had full access to all the private and public papers of the Tsar, the Duma and all government ministries. Never has such an exhaustive commission into the form, behavior, structure and functioning of the royal government ever been attempted, and certainly, can never be again, given the full access to all records the Commission had (much of which was destroyed by the Bolsheviks for obvious reasons). They found, not only no moral problems with Rasputin, but also that the Imperial government maintained the highest standards in personal dignity while holding office. And all this from the sworn enemies of the Imperial government.

Significantly, the author reports many of the spiritual teachings of Rasputin. He never sought disciple, but he certainly attracted them, and one of his most ardent was the author. Now, here is where things get sticky. Though there is no direct evidence that rasputin was ever a member of one of the small sects that dotted the Russian landscape, some of his teachings are eccentric in the context of Russian Orthodoxy, a view the royal family was certain he espoused. Here, for example, are a few of the spiritual maxims Rasputin made central to his teaching (as reported by the author):

1. Be master of your own Will

2. Don’t worry

3. When in doubt, wait for light

4. Never show temper

5. Keep unpleasant opinions to yourself

6. Take all advice offered to you, but act on your own judgement

7. Be genuine and sincere

8. Understand your own powers

9. Understand your own weakness

10. Have faith in men and yourself

11. Love truth and justice supremely

12. Hold the eye of energy upon life’s ultimate goal

13. Seek light and life up to al light possessed.

According to the author, these were the central maxims of Rasputin’s life. Now, as nice as some of them are, there is a rather odd absence of any reference to God, the Trinity, the church or Jesus. The continued, undefined and deliberately vague use of such terms as “Will” or “the light” are certainly representative of sectarian and semi-gnostic views. He makes reference to faith (#10), but no reference to faith in God. #11 tells us who to love, and it’s not God, Christ, or anyone else. It is the vague and abstract words “truth” and “justice.” Of course, there are 13 maxims that made up his “commandments,” a number loved by Masons and other occultists. This is hardly the language of Russian monasticism, and therefore I remain highly suspicious of the author’s conviction that Rasputin was just a good, simple Christian. There is no mention of Rasputin ever receiving communion, going to confession or other practices normal to Orthodox life. This would explain the nearly universal suspicion of Rasputin exhibited by the upper clergy in the church, which the author fails to explain any other way.

In short, this book is a well done revisionist understanding of Rasputin from one of his ardent supporters and disciples. There is every reason to believe her most important points about the man, and his enemies, largely because they derives solely from eyewitnesses and police reports. For this reason alone, it is an extremely important book. It will not be taken seriously by scholars in “Russia studies,” for it proves one of the major points made by monarchists, then and now: that the nobility in St. Petersburg was anti-tsarist and viewed “parliamentary democracy” as merely a means to gain power under the ubiquitous slogan of “human rights.” Dr. Judas clearly, and though first hand accounts solely, bears this age-old contention out. The peasants were right after all: the tsar was good, his bureaucrats and nobles, bad. This refrain is to be found in peasant folk songs and dances from the 15th century onward, and Dr. Judas shows they were not too far off.

Rasputin was clearly not a bad man, but neither was he an Orthodox one. He spoke of Christ, but did not believe he founded a church. He told men to put their faith in one another rather than God. Nevertheless, had he been listened to, world history would be radically different. He was a quick-witted, educated and very practical man who strongly respected the royal family and wanted their protection, and nothing more. Rasputin correctly predicted that Russia’s entering into World War I would be the end of her, and this prediction, among other things, earned him the hatred of the Petersburg salon crowd. “Neither Devil nor Saint,” a very appropriate title.

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Reply from Majorie Rich

Dear Matthew:

It was a real pleasure to read you again. I enjoyed your review of Dr. Judas's book, but I do disagree with a lot of her claims, and will tell you why. All my quotes and remarks are from The Fall of the Russian Monarchy by Benard Pares who was Professor of Russian History, Language and Literature, University of Liverpool 1908-18 University of London 1919-36. In his Introduction he says: "I know of no period of history which is so rich in first-hand materials. That is, of course, due to the Revolution. It is true that a good many materials that I was following up have been lost for ever; for instance, being allowed to live with my regiment that I liked at the Russian front during the War, I found it easy to obtain a lien on the regimental records; but these, for the most part seem to have disappeared. On the other hand the Revolution opened access to a vast number of materials of infinitely greater value, many of which, without it, could hardly ever have been known to the public–private letters of the most personal kind passing between the chief actors in the period, diaries and other personal records. Here, as a student of history, I must pay the warmest tribute to Professor Michael Pokrovsky, the communist historian, to whom fell the priceless opportinity of making the greater part of this rich material accesible. Pokrovsky carried his extreme views into his historical studies, and they have now been discarded in the Soviet Union; but he had those instincts of scholarship which has always been so precious to the academic world of Russia, and in organizing the the work of research and publication under his leadership, he did not forget he was a historian."

I don't believe her claim that the young Alexis did not have hemophilia, and as you mentioned, there are many contradictions. It was through the boy's illness that Rasputin was brought into the palace. He may not have "cured" the illness, but there is no question that he brought relief from his pain. As his last nurse, Teglova, put it to Sokolov, "Call it what you will, he could really promise her (Empress) her boy's life while he lived." So it is easy to see why the Empress turned a deaf ear when Rasputin's many escapades were reported to the Tsar. And some. like the monk, Illidor, and the Bishop Hermogen, were dismissed and sent to different monasteries outside St. Petersburg. Lucas claims that Rasputin, as a Christian, was opposed to hypnosis. Pares wrotes; "Rasputin had already become a great preoccupation to-the principle Ministers. When Stolypin's children were injured by the attempt on his life in 1906, the Emperor had offered him the services of Rasputin as a healer. Later there was an interview between the two at which, according to the account that Stolypin gave to Rodzyanko, Rasputin tried to hypnotize this fine, sturdy and sensible man; Stolypin described how repulsive it was to him. He made a plain report on Rasputin to the Emperor. At the beginning of 1911 he ordered Rasputin out of St. Petersburg and the order was obeyed Stolypin's Minisater of Religion, Lukanov, on the reports of the police, ordered an investigation, and abundant material was forthcoming. From this time ,onwards, the Empress hated Stolypin." For Judas to claim that Rasputin had no political agenda, is ludicrous. All through Pares'book Rasputin brags about not only his sexual conquests, but his polital importance to the Tsar. He was no monarchist, and despised the nobility and declared them members of another race. Surprisingly, he and Count Witte, who held the same views, became friends, One thing I agree with then on, and that was, they both opposed the war and "English diplomacy." Pares says; "On Witte's side, with his rather obvious cunning and predilection for intrigue, it is almost certain that he would be one of the first to gauge Raspotin's political importance and to make use of it." I doubt that Prince Yussupov moved to England to "avoid embarrassment", but he moved there to attend Oxford. I remember that well, as he took an entourage of servants with him, quite unlike most college boys. I do not believe that any "Mad Gang" members killed Rasputin, but I do believe Prince Yussupov's account, plus and Rodzyanko's account in his "The Reign of Rasputin." However, I would not at all be surprised if the "perfidious Albion" didn't have a hand in it.

I was going to list some of the scandalous things that Rasputin did, and was investigated for, but I would run out of time and patience. Nowhere does Pares mention V.M. Rudnev, who gave the Duma findings, but Radzinky does in his "The Last Tsar." He says: "One of the most valuable materials for illuminating the personality of Rasputin was the observations journal kept by the surveillance established for Rasputin by agents of the secret police. The surveillance was both external and internal, and his apartment was under constant watch....Since the periodic press paid inordinate attention to Rasputin's unruliness, which became synonymous with his name, the investigation has given this issue proper attention. The richest material for illuminating this aspect of his personality came from that permanent secret surveillance of his apartment, which made it clear that Rasputin's amorous exploits did not go beyond nighttime orgies and young women of frivolous conduct and chanteuses, as well as with several of his suppliants....As far as his proximity to ladies of high society, in this respect the surveillance and investigation obtained no materials whatsoever." A far cry from Judas's claim. It did proves Rasputin a braggart." In pointing out the Tsar's weakness as a strong leader, does she think that historians blame Rasputin for the Revolution, so she wants to put the blame elsewhere.? That Revolution would have been carried out whether Rasputin had been born, or not. Not being a hard autocratic leader, the Tsar gained Sainthood. Pares saw the Tsar's diary, and his last entry. "Avdeyev was replaced by a Siberian Jew, Yurovsky, a man with a most sinister face and record. Nicholas notes in the last published entry in his diary," This specimen we like least of all."

You aptly called the spiritual maxims of Rasputin what they were. Thirteen, the number beloved of the Freemasons and other occultists. Dr. Judas could have known Rasputin all her life, but that s doesn't make her appraisal of him accurate. I have friends that have known George Bush all his life, and in spite of the damning evidence of his failure as a leader, still support him, and some even think he is intelligent I hope that this lengthy epistle hasn't bored you, as you know more about Russia than anyone I have ever read.

My best wishes to you and yours, Marjorie

Dear Majorie: You are very correct. However, I do think that Judas needs to be read, as she was an eyewitness after all. There can be no doubt that other eyewitnesses have contradicted her testimony. I am certain that Rasputin was not a Christian in any recognizable sense and this is the most significnat aspect of Judas’ book of all: even his greatest admirers, when sizing up his religious credentials, saw no room for Christ or even the Trinity in Rasputin’s words. MRJ

Sts Peter and Fevronia of Murom as Exemplifying Russian Royalism

The Tale of Sts Peter and Fevronia of Murom as Exemplifying Russian Royalism
Matthew Raphael Johnson

The Tale of Sts Peter and Fevronia of Murom was never taken as a canonical part of their vitae. While these two saints were indeed monarchs of the city of Murom at in the midst of the Russian middle ages, this particular story seeks to find the mentality behind their rule rather than the literal historical truth. Its purpose is to exemplify the nature of Old Russian morality and political theory in a manner where common folk can understand it. And for this reason it is worth analysis.

This story was written, according to some, in the early part of the 16th century, and was meant to be held up as a model for royal rule and its problems. The beginning of the story concerns St Peter's father, Prince Paul, as he justly rules the city of Murom. As it happens, a demon regularly comes in the guise of Paul in order to debase and defile the princess. The demon is called a “serpent” and is solely concerned with destroying this Christian marriage. Since Paul cannot be in two places at once, it does not take long to figure out that this person in the princess’ bed is not the Prince, but a demon, a changeling so common in medieval literature. A changeling in medieval literature can be one that has no integrity, a vapid figure that serves whoever is in power. It can also be a monster, a wizard that has mastered the science of genetics and hence, can change his makeup at will. Even more, a changeling can be an illusionist, one who depends on misdirection and double talk to get his way. All might be summarized in the form of the demon here, one who seeks to defile the princess because she is an Orthodox ruler, the worst affront to Satan, who seeks rulers only after his own heart.

Prince Peter is called in to kill the changeling, and the blood from the serpent stains the skin of Peter, creating an attack of a severe skin disease that leads to severe scabbing. It will not go away, but does refer to the lifestyle of demonic people: blood was and is considered in the medieval era as the source of life, the basis of one's “genetic makeup” and, in some sense, the very life of one's mentality, the lifestyle of the person. Hence, in this case, the demon or wizard who is capable of becoming the prince has a lifestyle that seeks to debase pious women, turning them to a worship of himself, and hence, his lifestyle, his blood, can harm all that see it, or come in contact with it. As a result, Peter seeks to be cleansed, and he goes to the village of Charity, not far from Murom, that is famed for its doctors.

The doctors of Charity are all female. They represent the Russian view of women at the time: smart, strong, wise, and the guardians of tradition and piety. The female doctor completely outwits Peter's machinations, and hence gains his respect. The maiden he first meets and the doctor she introduces him to are all quite talented and wise, all of whom are pious and seeking of moral rule.

However, the first maiden he meets is Fevronia, a woman of low station, as her father is a collector of pitch for construction. Noah used pitch to cement together the pieces of the ark in the Old Testament, and it might be the case that the symbol of pitch is used to show that her father is very pious, and might well be the laughing stock of the area for so being, as Noah was. It may also mean that the author sees that a storm is coming in society, and hence, the symbol of pitch is used to show how pious people must all band together for safety in the face of danger. Either way, Fevronia's low estate is important because it leads to many problems later on. For her part, Fevronia holds that if she assists in the curing of Peter, then she must web him, and thus, become Princess of Murom.

The cure itself concerns the application of a salve made primarily from leaven, upon the wounds of Peter, all except one scab, which must remain uncovered. The central ingredient of leaven can only be the Eucharist itself, where the Orthodox world holds that the leaven is representative of the Holy Spirit, the leaven of the Orthodox community and the cause of its improvement and growth. Since Peter has been infected by the lifestyle of the demon, fornication and the notion of sex as conquest, he needs the purity of the Eucharist, as well as the humility to take Fevronia as his mental superior and his wife, though she is of low station. Repentance comes before communion in that Peter is forced to concede that the women of this village are smarter and wiser than he, and thus, is humbled by it. The purpose of leaving one scab uncovered is to remain in some level of sin, since St. Paul holds that these sins can serve to humble us, the “thorn in the side” of our moral life that keeps us mindful of our own low station as sinners.

What is truly significant is that when Fevronia weds Peter and, after the death of Paul, becomes princess of Murom, the boyars become angry, “outraged” that such a low born woman should rule over them. The aristocracy, especially the women of the upper classes, rain down abuse on the new princess for the most trifling of issues, especially her habit of eating all the crumbs off her plate after dinner like a commoner. The behavior of the boyars are central to this story: they are the principle of division in Russian society, they care not for justice, but only for that which justifies their money and oligarchical rule. In disgust, Peter and Fevronia abdicate the throne, to the horror of the nobility.

This must have been written during the reign of Ivan IV, since he too abdicated the throne and was followed by the boyars who could not rule without him. The coincidence is too striking. In both cases, the nobles cannot rule, since the people hate them and, more importantly, that they will merely fight each other for honors and thus, the city will fall into civil war. This is the real purpose here: the Russian aristocracy is the enemy of the state and of Russian Orthodox unity. A true monarch cares about the Law of God and the common good, while the aristocracy cares only about honors and wealth. But in order to enjoy this, they must defer to the monarchy, placing them in a humiliating position.

Like the case of Ivan IV, Peter and Fevronia come back to rule, and the author, in some detail, holds out the nature of their rule and as a result, gives us a real glimpse of how literature Russians in the 16th century viewed royal justice. The points the anonymous author makes are these:

First, that alms giving is one of the first duties of monarchs. They are to give of their own personal fortune to the poor, to the building of churches, schools and hospitals. This is the first mark of a just ruler, the giving of himself and, unlike the aristocracy, taking no account of the money itself, but the good that it will do in society. Second, the monarch will love all equally, without regard to station or place in life. This was one of the things that Fevronia was attacked for by the aristocracy: she took no account of class, but only of the person as God's image. But this becomes important for the Russian view of monarchy, that class should not have any bearing on royal justice, bit only God's law should be done.

Third, the royal family should hate, but hate only those who exploit the people, that is, the aristocracy, the old boyars who care nothing for law or the common good. Historically, the wealthy of a society overthrew European monarchs in the 19th century solely in order to create capitalism and democracy, where only the wealthy rule, but they do it through “free elections” where one faction of the wealthy can be elected over another. Democracy, as the 19th century view had it, was a means for the wealthy to overthrow the monarchy and hence, divide up the country among themselves, and succeed in calling this “freedom” and “legal equality.” This was the ultimate upshot of the 19th century revolutions, the wealthy, including substantial parts of the old nobility, sought once and for all to overthrow the old monarchy and hence, replace it with oligarchy.

Fourth, though the monarch should always hate these exploiters and their double-talk ideology, they should never be angry. This is taken as central to royal rule in this Tale, as anger might lead to acts that are not tempered by law or mercy and hence, the monarch must always keep his temper in check. Fifthly, the monarch should use his own money, as well as that of the wealthy, to always make sure that the poor are fed and housed. Poverty is not going away, some will always lose out in the immoral race for wealth. The most that a good state can do is make sure that the poor never go below a certain point, and for this author, this safety net should come from the wealthy themselves, including the royal family. And lastly, the royal family, as exemplified in this piece, should take royal vows at their retirement, so as to do penance for their own sins as well as to serve as an example to others.

Hence, the story of Sts Peter and Fevronia of Murom can be taken as a mirror for Russian princes. Though the story is simple and easy to follow, it is saturated with moral ideas and concepts that give us a glimpse of the basic social ideas of the time. Marriage and woman were sacred as they represented the transmission of the Orthodox faith and the piety of woman was to be an icon for all to follow. Women were not to be weak or timid, but strong defenders of the faith and keepers of the folk wisdom of the people, a fold wisdom that brought the Russians through the Mongol occupation, mass slavery from the southern tribes and the endless wars with Poland and Sweden to an empire. While many alienated academics scoff at “folk wisdom,” the fact is that it has done more than the artificial and plastic morality and TV-pop culture of today to maintain a strong, hardy population that was capable of dealing with a level of suffering that the American couch potato could never imagine, let alone survive.

Hence, this Tale should be read and made a part of one's emotional and intellectual baggage. It is itself an icon of Old Russian piety and political ideas, simple and based on common sense. It shows the power of folk wisdom and its ideals, in that it is this wisdom that has brought Russia through its intense sufferings to see a growing population and a strong empire. How “primitive” can it be? Folk wisdom is nothing other than the practices that have brought a people though suffering and form the very backbone of the organic nation—the folk, the people. Without it, you have the modern couch potato, the most oblivious product of western “progress” and “positive science.”

Is There Salvation Outside of Orthodoxy

Is There Salvation Outside of Orthodoxy?
Matthew Raphael Johnson

Orthodoxy, throughout its 2,000 year history, has claimed, without interruption, that it is the repository of the Apostolic faith, that is, it is the place where the ancient doctrines of Christianity can be found. Therefore, the claim is made that truth has as its fundamental value salvation, that is, salvation cannot derive from falsity, error, schism.

Modernist Orthodox have, above all things, rejected this fundamental dogma of the faith, that salvation is a function of truth, that is, of true belief. Therefore, they have, to one degree or another, become apostates from Orthodoxy. From its central idea that truth, happiness and salvation are one and the same thing.

The purpose of this brief paper is to outline, for non-Orthodox who wish to know, the basic ancient writings on the question of truth, Orthodoxy and salvation. First, though, here is a quote from the infamous meeting of the World Council of Churches in Barr, Switzerland, in 1990; it is significant because it lays out the groundwork for the ecumenical agenda:

    "We see the plurality of religious traditions as both the result of the manifold ways in which God has related to peoples and nations as well as a manifestation of the richness and diversity of humankind. We affirm that God has been present in their seeking and finding, that where there is truth and wisdom in their teachings, and love and holiness in their living, this like any wisdom, insight, knowledge, understanding, love and holiness that is found among us is the gift of the Holy Spirit. We also affirm that God is with them as they struggle, along with us, for justice and liberation. . . .

    This saving mystery is mediated and expressed in many and various ways as God's plan unfolds toward its fulfillment. It may be available to those outside the fold of Christ (Jn. 10.16) in ways we cannot understand, as they live faithful and truthful lives in their concrete circumstances and in the framework of the religious traditions which guide and inspire them. The Christ event is for us the clearest expression of the salvific will of God in all human history. (I Tim. 2.4). . .

    We feel called to allow the practice of interreligious dialogue to transform the way in which we do theology. We need to move toward a dialogical theology in which the praxis of dialogue together with that of human liberation, will constitute a true locus theologicus, i.e. both a source of and basis for theological work. The challenge of religious plurality and the praxis of dialogue are part of the context in which we must search for fresh understandings, new questions, and better expressions of our Christian faith and commitment."

This pseudo-intellectual obfuscation and mystification of the WCC (financed by the Rockefeller family), was signed by nearly all the world’s Orthodox churches. However, the Orthodox church rejects these ideas, as evidenced by the citations below. Most New Calendar Orthodox believe the heresy that salvation is possible outside the canonical boundaries of Orthodoxy, however, this is an error, and one that destroys the specific mission of the church in the world. For recent converts, it is rather difficult for these Americans, whose spirituality was formed by the secularized, neo-Protestants whose teachings change with the seasons, cannot stand the rather “strong milk” of Orthodox teaching on this most important of matters. The purpose of me compiling these sources is to let the converts know that Orthodoxy has always spoken with a clear voice on these issues, and new calendarist bishops do not have the power to change this. The Antiochean, Greek and OCA branches of Orthodoxy hold to the heresy of universal salvation (except, so I hear, for people like me) so as to be accepted within the Protestant ecumenical bodies whose grant money keeps the new calendar seminaries going. The reality is, however, that Orthodox teaching is clear and uncompromising, as these citations show.

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    * Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not according to the tradition which he received from us. (II Thessalonians 3:6)

    * Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. (Matthew 10:34-36)

    * A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, "You are mad; you are not like us.” (St. Anthony the Great)

    * Follow the straight path which has been charted by our Lord Jesus Christ, and do not allow yourselves to be encircled by sin...Today's path which is followed by various societies is directed towards sin. The cause of this is the development of civilization - of wrongly conceived civilization - towards which the various leaders are striving by diverse means to direct mankind, trying to create a new way of life, different from that prescribed by the Lord. (Saints Raphael, Nicholas and Irene of Lesvos.)

    * Those things which the holy Fathers laid down as law and all that is of our Church is good holy, both in soul and body. And whatever is done outside our Church is all of the devil. (St. Kosmas Aitolos)

    * For whomever the Church is not mother, God is not father. (St.Cyprian of Carthage)

    * The Church is the salt that salts the whole world, preserving it from putridity. (Venerable Ephrem the Syrian)

    * I, my Christians, read both about priests and about impious people and about atheists and about heretics; I investigated the depths of wisdom. All faiths are false, fake; all are of the devil…Only the faith of the pious and Orthodox Christians is good and holy. (Saint Kosmas Aitolos)

    * Concerning the fact that those belonging to the Church must not be allowed to go visiting the cemeteries or the so called martyria of any heretics, for the purpose of prayer or of cure, but, on the contrary, those who do so, if they be among the faithful, shall be excluded from communion for a time until they repent and confess their having made a mistake, when they may be readmitted to communion. (Canon IX of Laodicia, Also approved by the Ecumenical Synods).

    * Let any Bishop, or Presbyter, or deacon that merely joins in prayer with heretics be suspended, but if he had permitted them to perform any service as Clergymen, let him be deposed. (Canon XLV of the Holy Apostles.)

    * There is one religion only, the Orthodox Christian Religion. And this spirit the orthodox one is the true one. The other spirits, are spirits of delusion and the teachings are mixed up. (Elder Porphyrios +1991)

    * If any man receive not Baptism, he hath not salvation; except only Martyrs, who even without the water receive the kingdom. For when the Saviour, in redeeming the world by His Cross, was pierced in the side, He shed forth blood and water; that men, living in times of peace, might be baptized in water, and, in times of persecution, in their own blood. For martyrdom also the Saviour is won't to call a baptism, saying, Can ye drink the cup which I drink, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? And the Martyrs confess, by being made a spectacle unto the world, and to Angels, and to men. (Catechetical Lectures Of Our Holy Father, Cyril, Archbishop Of Jerusalem - Lecture 3.)

    * All the teachers of the Church, and all the Councils, and all the Divine Scriptures advise us to flee from the heterodox and separate from their communion. (St. Mark of Ephesus)

    * Concerning the necessity of not permitting heretics to come into the house of God, so long as they persist in their heresy. (Canon 6 of the Council of Laodicea)

    * Do not err, my brethren: if anyone follow a schismatic, he will not inherit the Kingdom of God. If any man walk about with strange doctrine, he cannot lie down with the passion. Take care, then, to use one Eucharist, so that whatever you do, you do according to God: for there is one Flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup in the union of His Blood; one altar, as there is one bishop with the presbytery and my fellow servants, the deacons. (St. Ignatius Of Antioch, Epistle to the Philadelphians, 3:2-4:1)

    * He that saith not ‘Anathema’ to those in heresy, let him be anathema. (Seventh Ecumenical Council)

    * Neither the Papist nor the Protestant church can be considered as the True church of Christ. The first was altered by a number of innovations and the accursed despotism (Primacy) due to which resulted the schism from the Orthodox. The same goes for the Protestants whose innumerable innovations lead to total anarchy and chaos. Only the Orthodox church maintained the teachings of Christ flawlessly without a single innovation. Only in the Orthodox church does unity exist. The unity which the Savior was petitioning from the Father saying, "Holy Father keep them in your Name those that you gave me so they can be one just like we were one." (John 17:11...) (St. Nektarios of Aegina)

    * St. John the Almsgiver said: We shall not escape sharing in that punishment which, in the world to come, awaits heretics, if we defile Orthodoxy and the holy Faith by adulterous communion with heretics. (The Life of St. John the Almsgiver.)

    * That one must not accept the blessings of heretics, which are rather misfortunes than blessings. (Canon 32 of the Council of Laodicea.)

    * The fact that we do not become indignant over small matters is the cause of all our calamities; and because slight errors escape fitting correction, greater ones creep in. As in a body, a neglect of wounds generates fever, infection and death; so in the soul, slight evils overlooked open the door to graver ones . . . But if a proper rebuke had at first been given to those who attempted to depart from the divine sayings and change some small matter, such a pestilence would not have been generated, nor such a storm have seized upon the Church; for he that overturns even that which is minor in the sound Faith, will cause ruin in all. (St. John Chrysostom, Homily One on the Epistle to the Galatians.)

    * Those that are not reborn by the divine grace in the only One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, they do not consist of (comprise) any church, neither visible nor invisible. (St. Nektarios of Aegina)

    * The sixteenth century gave birth to four great beasts: the heresy of Luther, the heresy of Calvin, the heresy of the Jesuits, and the heresy of the new calendar. The heresies of Luther and Calvin were refuted by [such and such] . . . As for the heresy of the new calendar, this was condemned by a decision of the great Ecumenical Council that met in Constantinople in 1593. (Dositheus, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Confession of the Orthodox Faith, p. 4)

    * But what a thing it is, to assert and contend that they who are not born in the Church can be the sons of God! For the blessed apostle sets forth and proves that baptism is that wherein the old man dies and the new man is born, saying, 'He saved us by the washing of regeneration.' But if regeneration is in the washing, that is, in baptism, how can heresy, which is not the spouse of Christ, generate sons to God by Christ?" (St Cyprian of Carthage, "The Epistles of Cyprian," Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, 388)

    * Caecilius of Bilta said: I know only one baptism in the Church, and none out of the Church. This one will be here, where there is the true hope and the certain faith. For thus it is written: 'One faith, one hope, one baptism;' not among heretics, where there is no hope, and the faith is false, where all things are carried on by lying. (The Seventh Council of Carthage Under Cyprian, (200-258 AD), September, 258 AD, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, pg. 565)

    * Marcellus of Zama said: Since sins are not remitted saved in the baptism of the Church, he who does not baptize a heretic holds communion with a sinner. (The Seventh Council of Carthage Under Cyprian, (200-258 AD), Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, 570)

    * Orthodoxy is such happiness, such riches! It alone teaches and provides all the paths to salvation. No Catholicism, no Protestantism, no other form of faith or denomination, gives that which the grace of the Holy Spirit gives through Holy Orthodoxy. (Vol 3, 1. Blessed Elder Sampson (+1979))

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Now, one might indignantly ask, what of those who have never heard of Christ, or of Orthodoxy specifically? Though as this is becoming more and more an irrelevant question, it is a legitimate one, and a few ideas might be required here:

First, there is an old Russian custom that St. John the Baptist approaches very human soul at the hour of death and preaches to them about Christ. To reject him is to reject missionary labors on your behalf.

Second, there is also the question of the acceptance or rejection of the religious system one is raised under. The honest seeker, one who rejects the paganism, for example, one has been brought up with is truly a struggle, and may well earn a place in heaven after being suitably preached to at the point of death. If however, one finds his religion satisfactory, one has a problem.

Thirdly, there is the continuous prayers for the dead performed by the Orthodox church on a daily basis. The time between the particular and the final or general judgement is a time where the church, which is the mind of Christ and His manifestation, intercedes for those who have departed in the faith, and for all departed souls. For example, an elderly Japanese woman, a neighbor fo mine, passed away. While she was in a coma, I prayed in her stead that I had accepted Orthodoxy in its fullness, and begged the saints to accept this prayer as if it were from her. I guess I’ll find out later if it worked or not, and I urge Orthodox people do perform this practice for all heretics and pagans who are dying.

Fourthly, those who are mentally retarded or otherwise incapacitated are incapable of committing sin and therefore salvation is automatic for them. The same goes for aborted babies, etc. The heretical Church of Rome struggled with this issue because they believe that the sin of Adam is hereditary, while Christianity has always understood this sin to manifest in the endless propensity for human beings to do the wrong thing. Therefore, the “unbaptized baby” question is irrelevant for the True Faith.

Fifthly, there is a question about the nature of Hades, or what the papists might call “Limbo.” Archbishop +IOANN of the Synod of Milan, a theologian of extraordinary abilities and the spiritual son of the Valaam/Pskov elder and Schema-bishop +THEODORE (Irtel), is of the opinion that hades was not destroyed at the Resurrection, but remains, in some form, to provide a place of natural happiness (though not the presence of God, and therefore this happiness is not unmixed with sorrow) for those who have departed outside the faith for faults not of their own. This is a highly controversial stance, and I hold a position of neutrality on it. Some church fathers have held that the “Bosom of Abraham” is just this place (whether one wants to call it Hades or not), a place that papists forgot about, and then reinvented it as “Limbo” centuries later.

However one cuts it, the principle remains, only Orthodox people exist in heaven, and no other. Whether or not such people have been evangelized at the hour of death is of no concern to Orthodox people currently alive, but is a position of ancient lineage in the Christian confession.

“If Salvation is difficult while Orthodox, imagine how difficult it is when one is not Orthodox.” –Blessed Fr. Seraphim Rose.

On Spiritual Sovereignty

On Spiritual Sovereignty - Sergeii Kornev
Translated by Matthew Raphael Johnson

This short piece comes from the website of the Pormorskii Bezpopovstsii, (priestless Old Believers) from the northern part of Russia and Latvia, the spiritual heirs of the Vyg community. This is one of the best works in the Old Faith I have come across in Russian, as it shows the Old Belief not about mere ritual problems, but about spiritual liberty in general and the true religious culture of Russia. It is a must-read for all who want to get to the bottom of the Old Faith controversy, a controversy that claimed nearly 20 million Russian followers by 1800. As always, my translations are rough and highly liberal. I am capable of no other – MRJ


A spiritual sovereignty of the nation, its people and culture, this is faith in the ancient ways, to stand on ones own two feet, to think for oneself. Opposed to this is spiritual slavery: the absence of faith and a clear fear of freedom. This is typified by the desire or acceptance of life by a strange doctrine and strange minds. It is the mind of renunciation. Spiritual sovereignty can not be confused with a vulgar isolationism or a weak willed nationalism. There are only two ways of dealing with a strange culture: either by dominating it, or allowing it to dominate us. Either we are to benefit from it, or when the stranger uses us for his own uses and purposes. Only a true spiritual freedom can permit us to look into the face of a stranger and see something good. Freedom is security.

For 300 years Russia has been deprived of spiritual freedom. The slightest attack from without brings it great harm and destruction. The worship of the west in the 19th century led to the dominance of Leninism in the 20th. This is not a mere historical happening, but a genuine crisis of faith, the rejection of what Russia is and was. The Russian Empire fell both to westernism and Aarxism because it no longer had and sense of itself and its purpose. Spiritual servility is never strong, it is always weak and can never really destroy its opponents.

The rejection of spiritual freedom came in the 17th century. The monarch of the country took over completely and sought to impose a strictly top down kind of control. The bureaucratization and militarization of the country destroyed personal independence and the old Russian life. The ancient system of the sobor was by the new regime, and the old life of sobornost was eliminated. Serfdom helped in this process. The church subordinated its people to the government combine. Independence, once cherished by Russians, was destroyed by church and state. The destruction of the dual power (i.e patriarch and tsar) was another manifestation of this: political policy based solely on material needs. Without spiritual sovereignty, this newfound Russian empire had no backbone: no real reason to exist. As this new empire expanded, it was embroiled into more and more warfare and conflicts, which raised taxes and drained the blood of the people. In other words, the increase of Russian material might was not balanced by spiritual freedom: hence, she was always ripe for revolution.

Right on the heels of the church reform in the middle of the 17th century came the political reform: these are one and the same movement. Independence was destroyed in the church, as well as in the fields. The Old Russian church was not merely a religious establishment, but the very heartbeat of the country. Independence and theology were natural parts of this nature: once this was done, there was nothing left but dissent. The center of the people’s self-consciousness was questioned and eventually destroyed, leaving a church and state as mere machines, devoid of life. The most steadfast Orthodox people were quickly destroyed and banished, leaving only the core of Nikon’s followers: the hangers on and career bureaucrats. The church, from that point on, was frightened and humbled to the earth, it did not take long to completely bureaucratize the church. Part of this process was the destruction of the church’s independence by confiscating all its properties and placing priests on a state salary. From here, she became, not the Nikonian tool, but the Sergianist one. Same principle, different time.

The NIkonian reform, followed immediately by the Petrine, was a revolution in church governance and church life similar to the British one carried out by Henry VIII and Elizabeth. The point in both cases was to destroy church independence and make it a tool of the state. The chruch was a focus of revolt against serfdom, etc., and to bring it under the control of the state was to coopt this Christian revolution, as was seen in Razin and Pugachev. The “synod” that peter replaced the patriarchate with was often led by non-Orthodox people and Masons, and was also forced to cooperate with other religions, often outright enemies of Orthodoxy. The secrets of confession were abolished, and the state became part of the confessional. This revolution of Peter’s was no different than the revolution by Lenin: both materialistic, both anti-Orthodox, and both were designed to create the shall of a church that was designed to deceive the population. The revolution was necessary, in a cosmic sense, to cleanse the church of its servility and worship of the state and social rank.

The Romanovs in Russia was a disaster: serfdom was strengthened, the national culture was sacrificed on the altar of westernism, and foreign culture took over at the highest level. The people were converted into slaves. Any independent spiritual life was violently suppressed. There was no independent Orthodox though in the kept, official, state church, and instead, a vulgar censorship was placed on the unstoppable scions of westernism: the leftists, the marxists and the materialists. They were the only outlet for non-official philosophical thought in the country. The kept nature of the church and the Latin-nature of the seminary instruction eventually drove seminarians to the arms of the leftists. Independent journals of all sides were shut down: Slavophiles and westnizers alike. The most patriotic element of the population were look at in suspicion. rally brought to zero, and slavophiles remained in the opal and the isolation. While the revolutionaries roamed free in the 19th century, the gendarmes were busy arresting harmless old men and women because they had old Russian books: and this under the reign of Alexander II!

The essence of the old faith is not liturgical or dogmatic. This is the Nikonian propaganda. It is about spiritual freedom and the freedom of the congregation. Even writers such as Chaadaev uses the Old Belief to conodemn the backwardness of Russia, ignorant of the fact that the true communal spirit of freedom was preserved only by these people! The Old Believer fanatic, burning himself alive! What an image! But it existed solely in the imagination of the isolated intelligencia who believes all of this was done in the name of the double Alleluia. Such nonsense. This is lie saying the millions of Russians who died fighting Hitler died for Marxist dogma. The essence of the Old Rite is not the rite per se: it is the sobor, the way of life.

People were killed not for reading the old books, but for defending communal and individual independence. The Russian people alone have the right to decide what is right and best: not the state. The Russian state imposed everything on the people: ideology, doctrine, absolute monarchy, etc. The Old Believers died for questioning the “divine right” of kings and the absolute state of Peter: the state that had no precursor in Russia, not even Ivan III: Peter took his ideas from Sweden and Prussia. The soul of Russia was murdered with every killing of an Old Believer.

The Orthodox religion under the Romanovs was merely a state cult: the worship of the state and the foreign policy goals of the divinely appointed emperor. After the church division (which was a division in lifestyle and outlook) the Russian no longer saw himself as a free being: he saw himself as part of a state, an empire. He became a serf, someone without rights or even a purpose.

The Old Faith differs from the new in its view of Russian life: the Romanov view was that the faith was a mere external set of dogmas, canons or liturgies. It was a state cult and not an integral element of life. The state was involved in the a-moral, Machiavellian world of power politics, where Orthodoxy has absolutely no place. The Russian became compartmentalized. Strict dogma is not the center of the Old Rite, but the fluidity in liturgical practices and monasteries, which remains at the center of the Old Faith. To externalize the faith into a set of isolated canons quoted mechanically is not the Orthodox faith. After the division the canonical dogmas were petrified in the contest with the Old Rite. Before the reforms of Nikon, the Russian church developed its own, independent approach to Orthodox life and customs. This was the manifestation of Russian freedom: there was never any slavish borrowing from the Greeks or Serbs. Russia built its own faith without violating and of the ancient canons or monastic traditions. Once the Old Rite was removed and the Old believers destroyed, the church destroyed also any serious originality in Orthodox life and thought. What filled its place? Western ideologies, luxury goods and fads.

The tragedy of Russian life came from the church schism. Spiritual independence was destroyed. The church ceased to be a vital part of Russian life. The state decided everything for you. The later terror, the camps and murders derived from this: the filling of real Orthodox thought with the asceticism of the New Men. From Nikon and Peter can be traced the rise of materialism from Nicholas I to Lenin to Yeltsin. The state from Peter’s time on was a rejection of all liberty and a rejection of all independence. But the rearguard action fought by the Tikhonite church, too late, as it turns out, against the Leninist regime was the identical fight that the Old Rite fought centuries earlier. The world of the Old believers was only appreciated with the heirs of Nikon hiding in the same Siberian forests as their Old Rite victims generations before.

Repentance is necessary for rebuilding: repentance of the church for seeking worldly glory from the state, whether the Petrine “synod” or the Living Church or the Sergainists–all one and the same. The old Russian nobility had become decayed, and the materialist service class took over. The old nobility traded their birthright for Parisian schick. A Holy War for the faith must be launched: a war for the hearts of the Russian people: who are they? Heirs of Boris and Gleb, or heirs of Nikon and Peter? What is needed is not authoritarianis but repentance, repentance individual by individual.

The national idea is not created by the state: it is destroyed by it. The state sucks from the nation, attempting to gain legitimacy from it. The ideas from the state ministers are not important, but will, determination, independence and a readiness to solve problems of the good and the bad in say to day life. The first step is to prove to the world that the Russian man is not merely a part of a herd of cattle, who seeks security and contetedly chews his cud, but one who possesses his own faith and will. It is frightening and uncomfortable, but what good has ever come from comfort? Not in this world. We will speak of the “spiritual revival of Russia” only when this is done.

Universalism, Moral Theory, and Ethnoanarchism

Universalism, Moral Theory, and Ethnoanarchism:
A Challenge to Contemporary Nationalism
By Matt Raphael Johnson

One of the more cutting criticisms of nationalism as a social and ethical movement is that it engenders an inequality of moral claims; that is, one’s nationalism necessarily comes at the expense of another’s, and it inherently demands the limitation of other or “opposing” nationalist claims. Hans Morgenthau’s famous “ABC paradox” is a manifestation of this difficulty. His 1957 article, “Paradoxes of Nationalism,” asks the question of moral consistency: Nation A invokes the principles of nationalism against nation B, while denying it to C, one of its own minorities. All societies have minorities. However, almost all societies have invoked nationalist principles against outsiders. Therefore, the anti-nationalist would conclude, nationalism is not a consistent theory of politics at all, but a convenient tool to use against outside opponents.

Nationalist theory, in the ethnic and cultural sense, rejects the existence of this paradox. Modern, liberal governments more often than not benefit from having a militant minority to use against nationalist parties, groups, and movements within the society who challenge the “multiethnic” state. Instead of considering the state as the locus of the nation, which is an error, the notion of the ethnos needs to be the central focus if Morgenthau’s criticism is to be withstood. The ethnocommunity is the primary variable in politics as well as world history; rejecting the statist model of the nation, the ethnocommunity controls its destiny within whatever territory it finds itself. There is no such thing as the “multiethnic” state, then, and the ethnonation becomes the focus of authority in terms of social life wherever it has settled.

The fallacy of the so-called “paradox” is that Morgenthau is speaking of states rather than ethnonations, and his paradox assumes the centrality of the state. A state might invoke its “cultural patrimony” against outsiders, but, for the sake of its own formal power, might deny it at home. Keep in mind, however, that states do not have “cultural patrimonies”: only nations do. On the other hand, Morgenthau’s criticism fails as an ethical one in that the ethnonation, even in a diaspora’s small numbers, should be the centerpiece of social and political authority, administering the social life of a people who consider themselves members. Of course, such a view radically undercuts state authority, and can exist only when the state is replaced by a cultural idea of the ethnocommunity.

Morgenthau’s argument is rather common, and recurs within the literature on nationalist thought and practice. However common and fashionable it may be, the argument is false. Nationalism, far from being essentially exclusivist in relation to other nationalisms, is inherently a universalist idea: nationalisms do not, and cannot, come at the expense of other nationalisms unless the others’ claims are too expansive and hence illegitimate to begin with. In other words, the ethnos becomes the focus of social authority. Therefore, it is ethnic belonging, not a specific territory or a formalized administration, that assumes the ethical mantle of legitimacy. Members of the ethnos are ruled, then, by the historical experience of the nation as a whole through its traditional institutions—rather than by the formal institutions of the modern state as its “administrative” apparatus. This might be considered a type of ethnonational anarchism, in which the formal and territorially-based institutions of the Leviathan are replaced, organically, by the traditional language, institutions, and experience of the ethnos. A citizen, then, belongs to the life of an ethnos, rather than the administration of a state, and is integrated into that ethnos through the guilds and system of internal distribution that the group has developed over the centuries.

In contemporary times, ethnic groups reach well over state lines through language clubs, churches (such as the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad), the institutions of a diaspora (such as relocation and housing services, etc.), and ethnic institutions of various types. Ethnonationalism, as an ethical foundation for civilization’s reconstruction, might make use of this foundation to provide those institutions with actual governing power and control over the economies of their communities centering around ethnic membership, though a membership that is culturally based, rather than one based on blood.1

Ethnonationalism centers itself on a cultural self-determination that takes its normative force in that the culture forms and nurtures the people under its care, making them truly individuals. Without culture and its institutionalization, individuals become mere embodied egos demanding satisfaction of their impulses; civilization becomes impossible and eventually unravels. Nationalism, then, takes the communal culture of a people (considered as making up the ethnos) as normative in the sense that it not only offers a coherent and civilized moral code (one necessary for properly social behavior within the community), but also contains the imperative (or moral motivation) of an institutionalized tradition; nationalism offers a particularly rich idea of moral psychology. When nationalism is connected to the concept of empire (that is, the subjugation of others for the benefit of the imperial power), it then becomes illegitimate, for it—by definition—interferes with the cultural aspirations of subject peoples.

Thus, within its proper bounds, nationalism, at least of a contemporary kind, demands a radical decentralization of world power and global politics. Politics becomes cultural; it becomes the expression of the ethnocommunity because it is only within the confines of a well-defined cultural community that ideas of “the good” or “rights” make any sense. Such words are culturally bounded. Liberalism, through its long and sordid history, has defined itself as precisely opposite this, claiming that justice is a purely procedural matter, rather than a substantial one, thus rendering culture unimportant and ornamental. This has led to the elimination of communal autonomy under the Leviathan, and, in turn, created the “abstract” notion of a consolidated public policy. Given that liberalism developed in the specifically cultural milieu of Western Europe, the idea is self-refuting as well as corrosive.

Liberalism must define itself in this way, for if the individual (ego) is supreme, culture is normative if and only if one so “chooses” it (itself self-refuting, in that the intellectual power to choose, and any interest in the moral results, derives from one’s surrounding moral environment and upbringing). Culture becomes a pleasant ornament, but ultimately not normative for a society (it is usually considered “repressive,” for it interferes with the economically profitable gratification of the passions and impulses); liberalism must demand that the individual ego rest upon itself, namely its drives.

Nationalism claims that politics and ethics exist only as part of a cultural patrimony, with its long-established ideas of the “right” and the “good,” that has created civilized individuals capable of studying moral philosophy or indeed caring about moral action. Otherwise, justice must begin and end with the demands of the individual ego, unconstrained, with justice never becoming an object to be realized, but resting on certain procedural norms which must be devoid of any cultural or moral foundation lest justice be considered by liberalism heteronomous.

Far from ethnocommunitarianism being relativistic, it is part of a natural law tradition that posits man as he can in no other way be posited: as the product of a community. Thus, the development of the community, including all the goods it has brought into existence for—cultural stability, education, language, material satisfaction, aesthetic experience, etc.—becomes the citizen’s by right. It is a Kantian deontology—but one removed from the abstract “individual” possessing, inexplicably, abstract rights somehow “adhering “ to his personhood—that renders rights and duties far more stable by way by connecting them with a functioning and living community; a community of language and historical experience that makes political life and words like “right” and “good” intelligible. If the goods promised by the very concept of community (rather than any specific community) are vitiated, then the community’s legitimacy can be questioned. Therefore, if one of the goods of a community is the protection of human life (a rather uncontroversial claim) and the community, somehow corrupted, begins to make legal the practice of abortion, thereby destroying its own progeny for personal gain and convenience, that aspect of the community needs to be fought, for it contradicts it own claim to existence. If a community, existing, minimally, to protect life, begins to extinguish itself on the Baalian altar of convenience, then it contradicts itself and is thus rendered immoral.2

Immanuel Kant’s error was to believe that ethics can be reducible to the most common element in humanity, that is, the concept of willing a law in general, which is the basis of the so-called “categorical imperative,” or the moral idea that any act of willing, in order to be called “right,” must be amenable to formulation as a “universal law.” Such universalism contains nothing of ethical value (as Hegel was later to charge), since it is an ethical void that is soon replaced by the far more vivid and concrete ideas of sensual gratification and egoistic behavior. It rejects the communal parameters which make any kind of choosing even possible. The weakness of Kantianism lies in the fact that the moral infrastructure such that “universalism” might be acceptable and considered “good” is a creation of civilized society.

The preexistence of the cultural structure of the nation, that is, the national community at whatever level, is necessary for the abstractions of the “will,” “intellect,” or even “natural law” and “right” to make any sense whatsoever. The very utterance of such terms is saturated with historical experience, for without it, the terms would have never come into existence and would not have the moral force they do. In other words, there are no abstract rights. “Rights,” as the term is used in modern political discourse (or what passes for it), are abbreviations of long-standing social practices and historical experience that have been reduced to slogans and propositions for the sake of easy communication, as well as less praiseworthy ends. To conclude from this that they are separable from historical experience is an inexcusable nonsequitur.

Thus Kantianism does not stand by itself, but is dependent upon the already existing social norms of eighteenth century Prussia, accepted solely due to the fact that the surrounding society has properly socialized the Prussians to demand some accounting of moral behavior. In other words, to care about right and wrong, and about proper and social behavior in general, is something that arises through the development of communal life and is inseparable from it. This is perennially the problem with moral theory based on abstract grounds. The “abstraction”—whether it be “rights” or “duty” (or some other such “imperative”)—never actually exists except as an abbreviation of an already developed sense of moral life that is itself the product of centuries of human behavior, historical experience, and mutual suffering that provide such ideas with their genesis, formulation, institutionalization, and moral force.

It is the nation, the community united by language and historical experience, not the “categorical imperative,” that socializes people to be civilized and moral. One can take Kant seriously only after reflecting on the fact that it is the civilized life that makes such questions even meaningful, never mind providing answers. Before even caring about whether or not one’s “will” can be formulated into a “universal law,” that is, can be done by everyone without contradiction, one must be civilized already. Kant’s ideas serve to place liberalism on a more German and idealistic metaphysical foundation, and find a less “philosophical” formulation in John Stuart Mill, several decades later, in the so-called “harm principle” found in On Liberty.3 For Kant, the notion of “universality” means that the moral worth of an action is dependent upon it being “universalized” without contradiction, defined as severe social dislocation. Therefore, a Kantian can say that lying is immoral for, if one were to universalize lying, i.e. imagine everyone lying all the time, then social life would quickly cease, for no one could ever believe what anyone said about anything. Therefore, lying is evil because it is socially self-contradictory.

Without the cultural community, Kant’s ethics becomes merely an eccentric hobby, a hobby that is incapable of giving us reasons for taking the idea of the “universal law of willing” seriously; in other words, there is nothing inherent in this ethical universalism and formalism that makes anyone interested in following it in the short term. Nietzsche did it terrible damage precisely for this reason. Once one rejects the moral imperative of cultural community, then there is really no reason why even “social contradiction” is any barrier to one’s behaving immorally. All that a neo-Nietzschean needs to say is that, taking a cue from Hegel, the will, the ego comes first, and the life of society is thus its product. From this proposition, logically untenable, it is impossible to avoid its consequent, that all cultural attachments are arbitrary and thus ultimately trivial and ornamental. Its force is then heteronomous and therefore unethical. Putting this differently, one would only listen to Kant or Hegel because there is already an inborn sense of community and emotional attachments to it and its welfare: “inborn” because any moral question, in order to make sense, must be formulated in such a way that it is salient to community life, and can only be salient if it is formulated in the language and basic conceptual apparatus of the ethnic community in question, taking into account their historical experience, sensitivities, weaknesses etc. Such a problem is the eternal difficulty of analytic methods in philosophy. To posit a “moral agent” is to posit an analytic abstraction, not a human being.

Kant’s interest in universalism and moral equality derives from strands of thought found within the entire history of Western European moral philosophy. Kant merely took a sliver of thought from his own culture and provided it with its own origin, the naked, abstract will that comes, literally, from nowhere. One might be attracted to it only so far as one is already socialized within an already existing humane morality. Such invariably comes from one’s cultural community or the nation. Only later does one theorize.

The development of a nationalist consciousness within a certain people requires only that the cultural norms of a society be normative for its politics within the confines of natural law. This is an alternative formulation of the idea of “self-determination,” a normative requirement for any nationalism whatever, and is the very substance of free action in the terms of international politics. The question remains, then, what does a nationalist do when nationalism rises within the borders of a historic enemy?

This question has long been vexing for nationalists. The answer is that nationalism is justified to the extent it is not inherently expansionist. To the extent a nationalist movement seeks to unite those under its cultural patrimony, it does not nor can it reject the claims of even its enemies to do the same. Furthermore, it is not in the nation’s interest to absorb those likely hostile to be to it. Such policies often derive from a ruling class that is alienated from the cultural patrimony of its own people, viewing culture not as a means in itself, but to some further end, such as political power.

An ethnos most certainly is not merely any group of people that develops common interests; nor is it synonymous with the state, but a possible list of a few requirements for a group to qualify as a nation might be listed here as an aid to the present argument:

* A nation must be defined by a common culture, a culture that is normative for an entire way of life, politically and ethically, rather than something specific, such as a social organization structured for a limited purpose. Yankee fans and computer geeks, then, do not form nations, for the simple reason that the nation is necessary for these second-order attachments to make sense, or even to exist.

* A nation is united by a common language though it is reasonable to claim that dialects and related languages might well coexist (such as Polish and Ukrainian; Spanish and Portuguese; Cantonese and Mandarin, etc.).

* A nation must be an entity of long standing. That is, a nation must have an objective ground in history; it must be the product of a long development. As the distinguished British political scientist Ernest Barker once pointed out, “The nation is a congeries of wills, acting through centuries.”4 Developmentally, a nation is the visible manifestation of the character of its people—a natural, organic synthesis that emerges over centuries from common traditions, customs, and folkways.

* A nation must view itself as such, that is, be aware of itself as such; this is the subjective ground of nationalism.

To the extent that any nationalist movement seeks to expand itself beyond these confines, it becomes not a nationalist movement, but an imperial movement, and thus a movement against the core ideas of nationalist theory. When a movement becomes imperial, the nation’s neighbors have every right to defend themselves. Beyond this, there is no moral ground for one nation to demand that another not become conscious of itself, or form its own institutions according to its own experience. Thus, nationalism can never of itself be synonymous with imperialism or wars of conquest. Warfare is legitimate only to defend the common cultural patrimony that is the nation, even if part of that patrimony happens to lie across a state border.

The solution to the endless problems of “minority rights,” “irredentism,” and other such irritants in world politics is the building of the autonomous ethno-community, absorbing social, religious, and economic life under its aegis. Self-determination is vitiated by the outworn and incorrigibly violent state apparatus, where bureaucracy inevitably takes interests to itself outside of the cultural patrimony which birthed it, thereby making itself odious to the ethnos. Therefore, the ethnic group expresses its rule through its own individuality, its own historical experience objectified in institutions such as craft guilds, ethnic churches (such as in eastern Orthodoxy), and local assemblies in tune with the tradition of the community in question. From these institutions does a properly representative system of rule come about, for representation is not about the shifting sands of individual self-interest or the demands of the libido, but rather the solid ground of the historical experience of a national history, the ethnos, the actual “individual” of history and politics. The institutions of rule, indigenous to a people, then take control over the aspects of social life impinging its members, objectifying historical experience and, therefore, the structure of maturity and intellect that creates citizens, rather than egos. The empowerment of the ethnos over and above the interests of the state is central to true freedom, identity, belonging, and peace among peoples. It is a true diversity in the Herderian, not the modern, sense.

Matthew Raphael Johnson is presently the editor of The Barnes Review: A Journal of Nationalist Thought and History, based in Washington, D.C. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1999, completing his dissertation on the relationship between modern science and political ideology through the work of Michael Oakeshott. He has published in numerous journals, including The Social Justice Review, the Plains Song Review, Rossia XII (Russian language), Foaie (Romanian language), and The Constantian: The Journal of the Constantian Society. His first book, Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality: A Concise History of Imperial Russia, has recently been released by the Foundation for Economic Liberty Press in Washington, D.C. At present, his research interests include the moral theory of ethnonationalism, as well as Russian ethnonationalism and Orthodox tradition.

End Notes

1. There is no question that a “blood” tie is a tenuous one for European ethnicities. Most European states presently are a mix of peoples, and over the centuries, the peoples themselves have mixed. Therefore,members of each family must decide for themselves which cultural patrimony they identify with. None of this entails a “rejection” of the others, but an understanding that cultural heritage is not an “ornamental” association, and that political allegiance cannot be separated from historical experience and the patterns of thought the ethnos engenders.

2. It needs to be made clear that abortion is evil because it kills babies. As seen from the perspective of national life, however, it is additionally an evil in that it destroys what the community was called into existence to protect, namely its own progeny, who will build upon the capital of historical experience and make additional contributions to their culture and, possibly, the world at large. In other words, the natural law, designed by God (as such objective laws certainly cannot seriously be described as random interaction, which is also a contradiction), implants in mankind the drive for community for its very survival. To then use the resources of that community to destroy that which it protects, namely life, is an absurdity and proves the immorality, decadence, and weakness of whatever community permits it.

3. Stated briefly, the “harm principle” goes like this: The moral agent can act as he wishes, and the authorities are only permitted to interfere with his self-will whenever there is a manifest harm committed. What “harm” means is anyone’s guess, and has not satisfactorily been dealt with in the literature. Often, “harm” is reductively defined as “physical damage” to persons or property.

4. Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), 5.