Essay: Gary Saul Morson on why Russian literature matters today

Aaron MacLean•December 16, 2016 4:55 am

Tolstoy, Chekhov / Wikimedia Commons

BY:

Among the many quirks of the small college where I was an undergraduate was that it required all students to read, in the summer before senior year, War and Peace. Far from being a dull project, for me the novel was a source of hypnotic delights: The competing role models of the dark, heroic Andrei and his friend, the searching, kindly Pierre; the attractive figure of Natasha—what now most holds me back from rereading the thing is the fear that, in my adulthood, I can no longer be charmed by her—not to mention the spectacle of these weirdly real souls caught up in all that war, in Great Events.

Never mind that the closest I came to an act of bravery was getting up before 10 a.m. and managing not to trip over the empties on my way to class. I decided that Andrei—tall, tragic, and irresistible to the ladies—was my kind of guy. Like preferring Achilles to Odysseus, or James Bond to George Smiley, this was a lifestyle choice. I expect a lot of young men who read the novel have a similar reaction, though I don’t know how many had a professor like mine, who delicately pointed out how my preference revealed that I was completely missing Tolstoy’s point. The ambitious Andreis of the world are very often incapable of happiness, he told me. It’s the bumbling Pierres who, despite appearances, really live.

I relate this story not because my moral education is all that interesting, but to make the more general point that a novel—a great novel, at least—really can be a source for such an education. That’s a commonplace enough assertion in some circles, though not, sadly, in most college literature departments today.

At least it would be supported by Gary Saul Morson, who has somehow not only survived but flourished as a professor of Russian literature, first at the University of Pennsylvania and today at Northwestern, and who came to Washington this week to deliver a lecture at the Heritage Foundation called “Pray for Chekhov: Or, What Russian Literature Can Teach Conservatives.” (It was quite excellent, and you can watch it here.) Morson would go much further, in fact. Western intellectuals, in his view, increasingly resemble the pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. Considering the totalitarianism that resulted when these men and women finally took power, this is not a reassuring observation. Morson warns:

Let me lay my cards on the table. To the extent that a group of intellectuals comes to resemble an intelligentsia, to that extent is totalitarianism on the horizon—should that group gain power. That, not Swedish style social democracy, is what I see happening here. I foresee in years rather than decades first a Putin style managed democracy, and soon after a Stalinist state, or rather one beyond Stalinism since Stalin did not have access to today’s monitoring technology.

The old intelligentsia—united, like today, by faith in materialism, socialism, and the power of science to order human affairs—found its enemy in literature, and in particular in the great realist novelists. Morson quoted the critic Mikhail Gershenzon’s line that “The surest gauge of the greatness of a Russian writer is the extent of his hatred of the intelligentsia,” and indeed the novelists generally took a dim view of their politicized intellectual contemporaries. At least one, Dostoyevsky, himself once a member of the intelligentsia, accurately predicted the logic of the twentieth century’s coming totalitarianism—for example, in the reasoning of Crime and Punishment‘s Raskolnikov, who opportunistically shifts between utilitarianism and relativism to justify his crime.

The real divide between the intelligentsia and the novelists was that the former were invested in all-encompassing ideologies of History and human action, while the latter, as documentarians of the complexity of man’s consciousness and the radical contingency of the actions of men in groups—of “history”—found ideology ridiculous. The novelists, through their very method, were “making a polemical point,” according to Morson. “The intelligensia denied that people were complex at all. Human complexity was an idea hindering radical action.” The realists stood in their way.

This was literature that stood not so much in opposition to philosophy, but offered itself as a replacement to philosophy—or at least, to modern philosophy, and to the social sciences. It was humanizing, pluralistic, and implied that one’s politics ought to follow from a sense of modesty regarding what man can know, and of what he can achieve. It was, in this sense, conservative. Some of the realists—most prominently Tolstoy and Chekov—also advanced an ethics that paired nicely with this politics: life was to be found in the unheroic moments between crises, and bourgeois concerns like treating your family well and paying your debts were tied to happiness.

I am not sure that Morson is right that we are on the path to totalitarianism. As he himself points out, the Russian radicals of the nineteenth century were revolutionists. Our radicals, bless them, seem too invested in bourgeois concerns like tenure to follow their own project to its logical ends. But his eloquent case for literature, and in particular for the realists, is of great value. It also highlights an enduring problem for conservatives: How do you interest the young in the case for modesty and incrementalism? How do you warn them of the dangers of heroism?

At thy second coming, O Christ, make me, who honor thy coming in the flesh, one of the sheep at thy right hand. 

(Compline of the Forefeast, December 20)

For Paul has also shown us that there are these two comings, in his epistle to Titus where he says, "The grace of God our Savior has appeared unto all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world; looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ." You note how he acknowledges with thanksgiving the first coming and that we look for a second.... So our Lord Jesus Christ comes from heaven and comes with glory at the last day to bring this world to its close. 

- St Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 15.2-3

   St John Chrysostom says: "[Sacrifice] was once for all offered, [and] carried into the Holy of Holies. This is a figure of that [sacrifice] and this a remembrance of that. For we always offer the same, not one sheep now and tomorrow another, but always the same thing; so that the sacrifice is one.... Christ is one, everywhere, being complete here and complete there also, one Body. As then while offered in many places, He is one body and not many bodies; so also He is one sacrifice. He is our High Priest, Who offered the sacrifice that cleanses us. That which we offer now also, which was then offered, which cannot be exhausted. This is done in remembrance of what was then done. For (He says) 'do this in remembrance of me' (Luke 22:19). It is not another sacrifice, as the High Priest, but we offer always the same, or rather we perform a remembrance of a Sacrifice." 

St John Chrysostom, THE NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS First Series, Vol. XIV, 
Homily 17 on Hebrews 9:24-26, page 449.

You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, James K.A. Smith, Brazos Press, 224 pages

By GRACY OLMSTEAD • September 22, 2016

I still remember learning Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E major. My violin teacher was a stickler for technique, especially when it came to playing Bach. She called this particular piece a “marathon”: it required careful pacing and a good deal of commitment. There are a lot of fast passages that, if learned too hastily, sound rushed and fitful. The key, she affirmed week after week, was to practice the piece slowly with a metronome, paying excruciating detail to rhythm and fingering. She assured me that once I grew intimately acquainted with the notes and bowings, the speed would come by itself. Like second nature.

She was right. And to my surprise, the more time I spent practicing that piece, the more I came to love it. Whereas at the beginning of my study I was only mildly interested in Bach, the more I played this and other pieces by him, the more I came to love his music, with all its delicacy and finesse.

Perhaps it’s this remembrance that helped me identify so deeply with James K.A. Smith’s new book You Are What You Love. Smith begins his book with a classic quotation from St. Augustine’s Confessions, in which Augustine declares that “You [God] have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” There is a teleological bent to human nature: we are dynamic beings in search of a specific end. And while philosophy since the Enlightenment has conditioned us to believe “we are what we think” (thanks in large part to René Descartes), Augustine’s statement positions the seat of human character and creaturehood in the heart, not the head, suggesting that our proper end is devotion, not cognition. “What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers?” Smith asks. Then, the question becomes not “whether you will love something as ultimate,” but rather, “what you will love as ultimate.”

We are in fact creatures most often shaped by our gut instincts and desires—governed by eros, not thought. Smith doesn’t use this term in a merely sexual sense: eros, for him, refers to the entire spectrum of human desires and loves that pervade our lives. But if our loves and motivations are governed by the heart or the gut, not the head, how do we know what we really love or want? Can’t we all too easily deceive ourselves?

Smith says yes—but adds a word of assurance. Our hearts are not unnavigable and unknowable: they bend to the tunes and rhythms we set for them. The key is to know that love is a habit, not merely a choice. In order to foster proper loves, we must consciously choose to immerse ourselves in the correct “liturgies”: defined here as daily rhythms, stories, and habits that shape us.

This is where that Bach Partita comes in: to foster virtuous love is “more like practicing scales on the piano than learning music theory,” writes Smith. “The goal is, in a sense, for your fingers to learn the scales so they can then play ‘naturally,’ as it were. Learning here isn’t just information acquisition; it’s more like inscribing something into the very fiber of your being.” Learning to love God is like learning to play Bach: it requires daily immersion in habits and practices that train the “muscles” of my heart to desire, and thus do, what it ought.

Smith points to the ancient liturgies of the Christian church as guiding voices that can sculpt our loves and pull us toward God. He pays careful attention here to the work that ancient musical worship, prayers, baptism, sacraments, and the liturgical calendar all do in shaping our loves. To take our faith beyond the realm of head knowledge requires “the recalibration of our heart-habits and the recapturing of our imagination”—something that happens when we regularly engage in “embodied, tangible, and visceral” practices. The order and cadence of a worship service begins to shape our imaginations, and thus our loves.

While he doesn’t unequivocally castigate modern churches, Smith strongly argues for a return to ancient ecclesiastical customs and traditions. He suggests that the disillusionment driving record numbers of young people from the church today has more to do with an abandonment of ancient liturgies than with “boring” tradition. Modern youth groups—offering doughnuts and grungy worship bands, hip youth pastors and foosball tables—tend not to reinforce the liturgies. Packaging a teaching in the trappings of pop culture treats young people like “thinking things” who just need the right verses and a few good allegories to stay in the church. But if Smith’s premise is correct, these ministries negate their message by reinforcing secular liturgies on a subconscious, gut level. Youth aren’t nourished by biblical arguments: instead, they walk away with stomachs sated by doughnuts, ears filled with popular music, and emotions fixated on the conversations and flirtations of their peers. This is not how we build ecclesiastical discipleship and community. This is how we lose young people to pop culture.

In contrast, the traditional liturgies of the church reveal to young people a depth that transcends cliché and a community “that is ancient, thereby connecting them to a body that is older than their youth pastor and wider than their youth group.” Indeed, Smith says his experience as a professor at Villanova University suggests that young people will be drawn and kept within the church by high church liturgy and ancient traditions—if the church is brave enough to embrace them once more.

But Smith’s examination doesn’t end with the ecclesiastical. If liturgy is to be defined as the habits and messages that undergird our lives and foster our loves, it cannot be confined to the four walls of the church. So he carries this examination onward: first to the family, calling parents to pay careful mind to the ethos they’re fostering in their homes. “Every household has a ‘hum,’ and that hum has a tune that is attuned to some end, some telos,” Smith writes. “We need to tune our homes, and thus our hearts, to sing his grace.” We can affirm the true, the good, and the beautiful through what we eat, watch, play, and pray.

A Christian home should be mindful of formative liturgies—“story, poetry, music, symbols, and images”—that foster children’s spiritual growth “under the hood” of consciousness. “Children are ritual animals,” he writes, “who absorb the gospel in practices that speak to their imaginations.” Participation in the liturgical calendar—using candles, colors, feasts, festivals, and stories—can help integrate our children into the family of faith.

But quotidian home practices matter, too: a family that regularly gathers around the dinner table is practicing a liturgy. So, too, the family in which gardening or other household chores are done together, bringing order and beauty to the home and its surroundings. Such practices help shape and cultivate the life within.

In education, there are also proper liturgies we can foster. Smith notes that from Sunday school to the university, there are stories of the good life, of what we ought to love, that are constantly propagated to our kids. He suggests fostering their moral imaginations at every opportunity, whether learning economics, U.S. history, or social studies. If we believe there’s a telos to human existence, and we want our children to recognize it, we should craft their education in such a way that they learn to trace its patterns throughout life. A “holistic, formative approach to education … is bound up with a teleological purview—embedding the tasks of teaching and learning in a bigger vision and ultimate Story that guide and govern learning.”

Smith warns that, if we do not tell such stories, we run the risk of our children tuning their hearts to culture’s alternative messages—to what he calls “rival liturgies.” These have their own vision of the good life and man’s telos and are often fostered in specific spaces: the shopping mall, for instance, fosters a worship of materialism and consumerism alongside deification of the self. One could also point to habits of worship fostered around the television, the soccer fields, or football stadiums, and the ever present smartphone. Pornography is a steadily more pervasive influence on American society, shaping views of sex and intimacy in adolescents and adults. This is an example of how a secular liturgy can shape our loves.

Because “our idolatries … are more liturgical than theological,” our daily habits and haunts reveal more about us than the statements of faith we might post on Facebook. Regardless of where you go, what you watch, what you listen to, there are liturgies to consume. And their messages—full of poignancy and life-driving potency—will direct your life goals and shape your character. If Smith is right, you become them because you are what you love.

Much like C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Smith’s book bridges denominational divides in order to urge a deeper appreciation and embrace of catholic, historic Christianity. He aims to foster practices that will encourage our faiths on an individual and church-wide level, without condemning a specific set of Christian believers. Such a project seems very timely, as legions of millennials leave the faith and an increasing number of American churches are shorn of their liturgical, theological splendor to become gyms and apartment complexes. American families, often driven apart by divorce, alienation, or generational division, are here reminded why they must hold fast the rituals and customs of their faith. We’re urged to keep on the lookout for secular, consumerist liturgies that might tempt us to improper loves.
Wikimedia Commons

It’s worth noting, too, that this book is palatable and engaging for those not sold on ancient church liturgies. I’ve spent the past couple months reading it aloud with my husband, who does not have a high church background and has expressed valid reservations in the past concerning its cadences of worship. This book helped him understand why I love liturgy and gave him a larger vision for the role liturgy can play in the church, regardless of one’s denomination.

Every night, as I tuck my baby girl into bed, I sing hymns and say the Lord’s prayer with her. If you think of her as just a tiny “thinking thing,” the ritual wouldn’t make sense. She’s too young to yet understand the words. But if we are indeed “first and foremost lovers,” creatures shaped by practice and liturgy, then every song and word has a purpose.

Father Menas used to say: "

I smile every time I think about the Holy Spirit!"

- The New Spiritual Meadow of the White Lake Hermitage (1896)

All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming - a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered the misery with tenderness. 

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Wind, Sand and Stars

Why does Christ's resurrected body bear the wounds of His crucifixion?

Why does Christ's resurrected body bear the wounds of His crucifixion?

A helpful summary from Aquinas, based on the Venerable Bede and St Augustine:

Summa theologiae IIIa q. 54, a. 4: “Whether Christ’s body ought to have risen with its scars?” He gives five reasons for why Christ rose with the scars of His passion:

I answer that, It was fitting for Christ’s soul at His Resurrection to resume the body with its scars. In the first place, for Christ’s own glory. For Bede says on Luke 24:40 that He kept His scars not from inability to heal them, “but to wear them as an everlasting trophy of His victory.”Hence Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xxii): “Perhaps in that kingdom we shall see on the bodies of the Martyrs the traces of the wounds which they bore for Christ’s name: because it will not be a deformity, but a dignity in them; and a certain kind of beauty will shine in them, in the body, though not of the body.”

Secondly, to confirm the hearts of the disciples as to “the faith in His Resurrection” (Bede, on Luke 24:40).
Thirdly, “that when He pleads for us with the Father, He may always show the manner of death He endured for us” (Bede, on Luke 24:40).
Fourthly, “that He may convince those redeemed in His blood, how mercifully they have been helped, as He exposes before them the traces of the same death” (Bede, on Luke 24:40).
Lastly, “that in the Judgment-day He may upbraid them with their just condemnation” (Bede, on Luke 24:40). Hence, as Augustine says (De Symb. ii): “Christ knew why He kept the scars in His body. For, as He showed them to Thomas who would not believe except he handled and saw them, so will He show His wounds to His enemies, so that He who is the Truth may convict them, saying: ‘Behold the man whom you crucified; see the wounds you inflicted; recognize the side you pierced, since it was opened by you and for you, yet you would not enter.'”
(from taylormarshall.com)

We were enemies of God by means of Sin; and God ordained that the sinner should die. Of two things, then, one must needs have happened; either that God should adhere to His word, and destroy all men, or that by giving scope to His loving-kindness He should annul His sentence. But see the wisdom of God. He secured, at once, reality for His sentence, and active operation for His loving-kindness. Christ “took on Himself our sins in His body, on the Tree, that we, being dead to sins” through His death, “should live unto righteousness.” He that died for our sakes was not of small account. He was not a literal sheep, He was not a mere man, He was not simply an Angel, but He was God Incarnate. The iniquity of the sinners was not so great as was the righteousness of Him that died for them. Our sins did not equal the amount of His righteousness, who laid down His life for us, who laid it down when He pleased, and when He pleased resumed it.

–St Cyril of Jerusalem, Lecture xiii. 53.

The spirit of Christianity is not literal, not pedantic, not regulatory; it is renewing and liberating. The acquisition of this spirit is not gained through a legalistic interpretation of words and texts but in the acquisition of love and faith, conscience and freedom… To be renewed according to the Gospel – wholly and to the end – is not granted to everyone. But to enter upon this path, or at least to try to enter upon it, is possible for everybody, at least for everyone who thinks seriously about Christian culture. This renewal is accomplished when the reader of Scripture does not merely register in his mind what has been said but endeavours to seek out and strengthen within himself and, if necessary for the first time, create within himself that which is described in the text: to evoke within oneself a feeling of mercy and commit oneself to it; to evoke within oneself repentance and to experience it creatively, to contemplate with one’s heart the perfection of God and abide within it until the heart and will have been filled with it (an act of conscience); to discover within oneself the power of love and turn it (albeit for a moment) towards God and then towards people and all that lives… At first the Christian begins to ‘put off the old man’ (Colossians 3: 9 – 10; Ephesians 4: 22) and then asserts the new within him. The true divine nature of Christ is revealed to this new man. And all of this is to be accomplished in the heart and feeling, but not only in them – it is to be accomplished by the intellect, but not only by the intellect; by the will, but also through deeds; through faith, but also through deeds; and first and foremost through vital love’

- Ivan Ilyin, The Foundations of Christian Culture

Repentance is the daughter of hope and the renunciation of despair.
- St John Climacus

The end of prayer is to be snatched away to God.

-St Gregory Palamas, Triads, quoting St John Climacus

So we should not be ashamed to acknowledge the Crucified. Let us not then be ashamed to confess the Crucified. We should boldly trace the cross with our fingers as a seal on our forehead and over everything: over the bread we eat, the cups we drink, when we come in and when we go out, before we go to sleep, when we go to bed and when we get up, on journeys, and at rest. It is a powerful protection; to suit the poor, it costs nothing; to suit the weak, it costs no labor, since it comes as a gift from God; it is a sign for the Faithful and a terror to demons. For 'in it he triumphed over them', 'openly making an example of them' (Col 2.15, adjusted). For when they see the cross, they remember the Crucifixion; they fear the one who crushed the dragon's heads (cf. Ps 73:14). Do not despise the seal because it is a free gift; no, honor the Benefactor all the more because of it.

- St Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis 13.36 

Never took, always received

... It was said of Father Menas that from the time he was cured of that fatal fever until his blessed repose, thirty-seven years with the brotherhood at the hermitage, he never asked for nor took anything, never reached out his hand for anything, but only received things from the hands of others. In this matter he was very strict, although also very meek, and he avoided situations where he might have to take something for himself. He simply never reached out his hand to take anything. Even in the refectory he would not help himself, but only take what he was given. In every aspect of life he did without unless someone would give him it. In this was shown his deep humility, and his profound gratitude to God for having been given time by Him for repentance, rather than dying in his sins.

- The New Spiritual Meadow of the White Lake Hermitage (1896)

.... the paralyzed man is any soul that thinks of turning back to the Lord and is brought to Him by these four things: self-condemnation, confession of sins, the promise to renounce evil, and prayer to God.

- St Gregory Palamas, Homily 29 "On the subject of the Paralyzed Man

March 24. Seventh Day of the Creation.

On the twenty-fourth day of the month is the seventh day of the world. On this day God rested from his work and hallowed the day.

March 25. Annunciation Day. Crucifixion.

 On the twenty-fifth day of the month the angel Gabriel came to St. Mary the first time with God's errand, and on this day St. Mary became pregnant in the town of Nazareth by the angel's word and by the hearing of her ears like the trees, when they blossom under the breeze of the wind. On the same place where her house then was as the angel met her, Christian men built a large church. After two and thirty years and three months Christ was crucified on the same day, and when he was on the cross, the creation immediately proved that he was true God. The sun became dim, and  the day was turned into dark night from noon until the ninth hour. When he gave up his spirit at the ninth hour, the earth quaked, and stones burst, and stone walls fell to pieces, and the graves of dead men were opened, and many people saw the dead arise from their graves and walk through the holy town of Jerusalem until the resurrection of Christ ; then their bodies as well as their souls entered with him into eternal glory, that we for our selves might believe with less hesitation [and] that we might learn by it. The rood of Christ on which he was crucified is in a church in the town of Constantinople, locked up in a wooden chest; and when the chest is unlocked, there comes forth a wonderful smell, and it is so delightful as if all blossoms were collected there, and of the branches of the tree flows a sweet-smelling fluid, having the resemblance of oil. If a small drop of this oil is given to a sick man, he is soon better. 

- an Old English Martyrology

Often, when I am singing hymns,

I find myself committing sins.

With my tongue I am singing praises,

but with my soul, I am pondering evil things.//

But correct both through repentance, O Christ God, and save me!

-from the Triodion

A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise (Psalm 50) 

We pray using the words of this psalm every day. When we are hurt, or worn out, we find consolation in them. In this experience we touch upon the core experience of all believers, that it is precisely in our neediness that God seems closest to us, and that when we cry out in pain and sorrow the Lord hears us. There is a paradox here. We seem closer to Him when we hurt. We can seem further from Him when we don't. All our striving in life is to feel good, be comfortable, relax, enjoy ourselves, be happy. And yet so often, in pursuit of these things, God seems distant and our sense of His presence dwindles away. All this striving is ultimately unsatisfying. We know that it is really only the presence of God that brings joy, peace, happiness - even in the most trying circumstances.

The elder Paisios once said that for love to blossom in the heart, we must pray with pain of heart. In explaining this he noted that when we hurt some part of our body - our hand, for example - all our attention and energy focuses on where we hurt. So too it is a hurting and broken heart that focuses our spiritual attention. When asked what can we do if, in fact, we are not suffering and our heart is not hurting, the elder relied: 'We should make the other's pain our own! We must love the other, must hurt for him, so that we can pray for him. We must come out little by little from our own self and begin to love, to hurt for other people as well, for our family first then for the large family of Adam, of God.'

“For, by the disaster of his charity, God plays out at last the Game that began with the dawn of history. In the Garden of Eden - in the paradise of pleasure - where God laid out his court and first served the hint of meaning to humankind - Adam strove with God over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But God does not accept thrown-down racquets. He refuses, at any cost, to take seriously, our declination of the game; if Adam will not have God's rules, God will play by Adam's. In another and darker garden he accepts the tree of our choosing, and with nails through his hands and feet he volleys back meaning for unmeaning. As the darkness descends, at the last foul drive of a desperate day, he turns to the thief on the right and brings off the dazzling backhand return that fetches history home in triumph: Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.

God has Gardens to give away! He has cities to spare! He has history he hasn't even used! The last of all the mercies is that God is lighter than we are, that in the heart of the Passion lies the divine mirth, and that even in the cities of our exile he still calls to Adam only to catch the Glory, to offer the world, and return the service that shapes the City of God.” 

― Robert Farrar Capon, The Romance of the Word: One Man's Love Affair With Theology

One day, Father Paul traveled to a big city. By then he was already
very old and half-blind. In the city, he co-served with a certain
Metropolitan. The Metropolitan gave Father Paul money for his return
trip and they took their leave of one another. There was still time
left until his train and so Father Paul decided to have lunch. He went
into a restaurant. The hostess behind the counter said to him, “Pops,
you had better get lost. You’re not dressed correctly for this kind of
place.” She had taken a look at Father Paul’s feet and had noticed
that he was wearing felt boots. It had been cold when he left his
village, but then they had had a thaw and pools of dirty water from
his boots were forming on the restaurant floor. The priest’s coat was
also second-hand and old, and the suitcase he was holding in his hand,
which contained his vestments, was scuffed-up. The young woman had
clearly taken him for some kind of vagrant. Father Paul left. He went
to another restaurant, which looked more like a cafeteria. They told
him that they only served prix-fixe meals. “I don’t mind,” Father Paul
replied. Father Paul left his suitcase by a table, picked up a tray
and placed his prix-fixe lunch on it. The lunch consisted of soup, the
main course and compote for dessert. He placed his food on a table and
was about to start eating when he realized that he had forgotten to
take utensils. He went back to pick up a spoon and a fork, got back to
his table and saw that a stranger had already placed himself there and
was eating his soup. Some prix-fixe lunch. Father Paul sat himself
down across the table from the man and, saying nothing to him, began
eating his main course. He finished it and stuck the slices of bread
into his pocket. The two of them shared the compote.

The man got up and headed for the door. Father Paul looked under the
table and saw that his suitcase was gone. The glutton had stolen it.
Not only had he eaten half his lunch, but he had pilfered his suitcase
as well. Father Paul jumped from his table and started after the
thief. But then he noticed his suitcase standing next to a different
table. His lunch was on that table, too, completely untouched. He had
made a mistake. The man was long gone. The story gave Father Paul a
headache. What a humble man that fellow had been, saying nothing even
though Father Paul had eaten half of his lunch.

- Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy by Maya Kucherskaya

 ... upon entering the waters of baptism, you took off your garment, and this was a figure of 'stripping off the old man and his works'. You stripped, and were naked, in this also imitating Christ, Who was naked upon the Cross.... May the soul that has once put off that old self never again put it on, but say with the Bride in the Song of Songs, "I have put off my garment; how then shall I put it on?" 

- St Cyril, Mystagogical Catechesis 2:2

A constitution is not meant to facilitate change. It is meant to
impede change, to make it difficult to change.

- Justice Antonin Scalia

A true synthesis, to my mind, results from a free play of contradictions, not from a denial - my paradise is one in which Eve is continually tempting Adam, Adam is continually falling, continually being forgiven, and continually forgiving Eve!

- Philip Sherrard, letter to George Katsimbalis (August 7, 1960) in This Dialectic of Blood and Light(2015)

a reflection before Theophany

Today is the Sunday before the Great Feast of Theophany, January 6, the celebration of the Baptism of Jesus Christ. This feast falls between the feast of His Birth on December 25 and the feast of His Presentation in the Temple on February 2 forty days after His birth. At the beginning of the month there was another, lesser feast – the Circumcision of Christ, eight days after His birth. Much later in the year there is a Great Feast, the Transfiguration, which now falls on August 6, but - liturgical historians tell us - used to be commemorated together with all the feasts I have just mentioned as a single celebration of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In short, these feasts were all celebrated as parts of one great feast, the feast affirming the ways in which the divine nature, and saving work of Christ, were seen manifested in and through the major events of His life. In the Nativity, the baby was revealed as the Saviour: to the Holy Family, to the Shepherds, to the Wise Men from the East; at the Presentation in the Temple, Jesus was manifest to the Elder Zechariah and the Prophetess Anna as the divine Messiah of God - to and for the nations, as well as for Israel; in His Baptism, the Father Himself proclaimed,  and the Holy Spirit witnessed to, Jesus as the Son of God, and this also happened at the Transfiguration. The life of Jesus is seen in light of the Psalmist David's affirmation that God is the Lord and has revealed Himself to us. This means that God is not unknowable, although He is, because He has chosen, determined, desired and desires to reveal Himself to us. It may be an admirable modesty to say that one is an agnostic, that is, one who simply doesn't know about God, and indeed there is a sort of healthy agnosticism rooted in modesty,  in the inherent limitations of our human capacity to know and understand God. After all, we not only have definite limitations as creatures, but even those things that we can know, we know subject to our fallen, broken, sin-tainted and partial ways of knowing. It is very easy to be wrong, mistaken, deluded. But God Himself has revealed to us such knowledge concerning Him as we are able to know. He has not left us to our own idiosyncratic and feeble gropings after what we think might be truth, but has given us all that we need to come to a knowledge of Him which is appropriate and adequate for us.

We can state this another way. When believers have reflected on the life of Jesus, as known to them in Scripture and the Tradition of the Church generally, they have seen the biography as something that is to be interpreted and understood in light of the experience of faith in the life of the Church, itself a gift of the Holy Spirit Who always testifies to Christ. Thus we say that the Spirit of God has shown and continues to show that in the person of Jesus, God is revealing Himself in the most personal, most intimate, so-most-appropriate-as-to-be-absolutely-perfect way. To know the Lord Jesus Christ is to know God, and the Lord Jesus Christ is for us the meaning of everything. We read the texts of the Old Covenant, all the Old Testament, and discover Christ anticipated, foreshadowed, expected. Indeed, we can read the book of nature in such a way that everything is a sign and witness to Him.

One of the most important aspects of this divine self-revelation in Christ, with a tremendous import for our moral vision and understanding, is that it is from beginning to end paradoxical in
terms of typical human expectations. A virgin gives birth. The eternal God enters time. The uncontainable is contained. The uncreated is created. The Law-giver submits to the law. The All-knowing grows in wisdom and understanding, One Who has no need of baptism is baptized. The All-powerful and Immortal One voluntarily submits to human weakness, to human awkwardness, to humiliation, to death. It is not through power but through love that He attracts and receives worship. It is friendship rather than compulsion that draws us into His service. He prefers companionship with the weak, the marginal, the outcast, the hurt and needy to that of those who are powerful, successful, tasteful, clever, good-looking…. From the very beginning, the apostolic Church understood that such paradox was a stumbling block to the sophisticated and the pious. It is not only the Greeks and the Jews who find the paradox of Christ offensive. We ourselves are tempted to make of our faith something conformable to fashions of sophistication and piety….

Nonetheless – the clear teaching of the Church, for those who will listen, and the clear example of authentic sanctity, for those who love the saints, is that the very structure of our salvation in Christ is paradoxical. May it be that through the life-giving paradoxes of salvation that our hearts will be enlarged, our moral imagination expanded, our spiritual education matured, our hope given strength!