BLESSED XENIA PETERBURGSKAYA: The Mad Widow

First: love the questions and comments my last post got! Please keep 'em coming; just because I take forever to respond doesn't mean I've forgotten or don't care.

Now to business! Eve asked a great question: "Were there ever married holy fools?"

I started writing this hours ago and it's turned into a beast of an answer, so I'm going to break it up into a series of meandering posts. Because I'm doing this for my edification as well as yours, I'm letting myself go off on tangents (within reason)-- I'll try to include a tl;dr summary at the beginning of each post and a master one at the end when I've exhausted the ten different essays I'm going to write in the course of answering this question.

TL; DR Version of "The Mad Widow"

- St Xenia became a fool-for-Christ following her beloved husband's death, possibly in an attempt to "compensate" for the fact that he died suddenly with neither Confession nor Communion

- Xenia's adoption of her husband's name and clothing after his death can be read as a harbinger of her theosis; in taking on aspects of his life she empties herself and obliterates her ego (think about that next time you see a crowning at an Orthodox wedding!)

- that Xenia's love for her husband is a driving element of her narrative makes hers an unusual vita; most female vitae include virginity chosen at a young age, forced or abusive marriages, or say very little about the husband at all

- love of the poor and love of man-made beauty need not preclude one another (hiya Calvinists)

- Orthodox glorification isn't exactly the same as Catholic canonization but I won't tell you why til you're older

Essential Russian!

iurodstvo  - holy foolishness

klikushestvo  - a shrieking ailment indicating witchcraft/sorcery-induced demonic possession 

BLESSED XENIA PETERBURGSKAYA: The Mad Widow

Transliteration note: in my opinion "Kseniya" makes much more sense than "Xenia" (from the Russian Ксения), but "Xenia" is the standard English transliteration, so out of respect for local tradition (read: *search optimization*) I'll stick with that one.

Upon seeing Eve's question, I thought immediately of the widow holy fools, like the famous St Xenia of Petersburg. St Xenia gave away all of her possessions and wandered the city as a beggar after her husband's death sometime in the mid-18th century. I actually had the great privilege of visiting the chapel built over her grave in Smolensky Cemetery in Petersburg in 2010.

Часовня Ксении Блаженной, Смоленское Кладбище, Санкт-Петербург
St Xenia's Chapel, Smolensky Cemetery, St Petersburg (source)

"WHOEVER KNEW ME, PRAY FOR MY SOUL THAT HIS OWN MAY BE SAVED"*

St Xenia's Chapel

Blessed Xenia is the patron saint of Petersburg and is especially beloved among women, who pray to her for intercession in family troubles. While being a wife or mother is never simple, in a country whose gender balance is still recovering from a century of warfare, where less than twenty years ago life was so difficult that male life expectancy plummeted to 56 (and even today is ten years below that of western European countries), where alcoholism kills millions every year, and children begin drinking heavily before high school, the cross women bear as the rock of family and society must be especially heavy. 

When I was there, the line to simply touch the walls of the small chapel was incredibly long-- women, young and old, all in head scarves, some with children, some with canes. I remember one woman posing a sickly young boy on crutches in front of the chapel for a photograph-- I can't know because I didn't ask her, but if she'd been documenting a pilgrimage for her parish I wouldn't have been surprised; many people travel from great distances to visit the shrine. Many light candles, some leave prayer notes-- I have been to few pilgrimage sites, and don't know whether that is common practice in Orthodoxy, or a particularity of supplication at St Xenia's Chapel (my instinct suggests the latter).

From the parish blog of the Righteous St John of Kronstadt Orthodox Church**:

"В советские времена в часовню нельзя было попасть – доступ поклонникам был закрыт, но люди все равно шли, прикладывались к ограждению с верой. С тех пор сохранилась традиция – поклонники обходят здание часовни с молитвой, прикладываются и целуют стены."
(Translation mine, proceed with caution.)
"In the Soviet era, it was forbidden to go into the shrine - access was closed to worshippers, but people went all the same, venerating at the fence [built by the Soviets to keep people from the chapel -TKB] in faith. Since then the tradition has been preserved - worshippers go around the chapel building to pray, venerate, and kiss the wall." 

Not every saint gets her own chapel, much less before she's been officially glorified (see below), but it is an honor perhaps especially worthy of St Xenia, who herself assisted with the construction of a church in the very cemetery in which she would later be buried. At night after the workmen had gone home, she would either bring large stones to the construction site, or carry the stones meant for the highest levels to the top of the scaffolding (depending on which vita you read). I like this story in particular because it illustrates that asceticism and appreciation of beauty need not contradict one another-- she herself went about in rags, ate little, and gave constantly of herself, but also dedicated her energy to building a new house of God in a city already full of them. Extremism in the pursuit of beauty is no vice!

PRECIOUS STONES ADORNING THE RAIMENT OF THE BRIDE

On Orthodox Glorification

Entire essays could be written on this alone, but for now I'll say simply that overall the Orthodox approach to numbering the saints is more decentralized and less defined than that of the Catholics. I was shocked when I first found out that Xenia hadn't been glorified until 1988 (to be fair, in 1978 by ROCOR, but that, too, is quite late). Her figure has loomed large over Russian history and culture since not long after her death around 1800; pilgrimages to her grave site began in the 19th century, and attachment to her was so strong that not even Soviet Leningrad could erase her from the hearts and memories of the faithful. I haven't looked into her case specifically, but from what I've read about the institutional glorification of other saints, the Church seems content to observe "local" veneration for quite long periods of time before beginning any official proceedings. Unexpected blessing of this approach: we can watch scenes from St Xenia's 1978 glorification service on Youtube!

FOR HIS SAKE: Sacrificial Foolishness?

Unusually for a female saint, the vitae are very clear that she loved her husband very much; some even imply that her holy foolishness was prompted by mad grief. Even more curiously, she responded only to her husband's name (Andrei Feodorovich); some stories say that she went about in his clothes. While she was not glorified by the Russian Church until 1988, veneration of her among the people is said to have begun even during her lifetime. We do know that by the end of the 18th century, locals referred to the street on which she and her husband had lived as Petrov Street, which was her husband's surname.

Some vitae say that taking on her husband's name, as though she had completely forgotten her own (and perhaps she had), is an illustration of the depth of her humility (see: kenosis); others feel less of a need to editorialize. Unfortunately I'm only looking through what's quickly available online, so I can't find out for how long that particular theory's accompanied her vita. I can say the adoption of the husband's name is quite idiosyncratic and not something I've seen elsewhere, although there are many stories of holy women in which either their birth names are not given, or no name is given at all (sometimes, in fact, as a story grows in popularity, an anonymous saint will be given a name, as with the Egyptian monk we now revere as Isidora).

An element sometimes emphasized in Xenia's story is that her husband died unexpectedly while drinking at a party and in a state of sin (without having taken the Blessed Sacrament). Some write that it was Xenia's concern for the state of her husband's soul that drove her to such fervent prayer, others that the suddenness of his death gave her eyes to see the frivolity and selfishness of her life and the strength to change course.

THE OLD BALL AND CHAIN: Of Witches and Wives

More typically widow saints (as relayed in the vitae) were forced into marriages against their will, or express no particular feelings about their husbands at all-- their deaths are rarely portrayed as joyous events, of course (a subtle tone of relief is sometimes conscioned), but as welcome developments giving the widows the freedom to pursue a more perfect holiness.

Holy foolishness among women, whether married or not, deserves examination in its own right, particularly in a country some of whose rural populations maintained belief in sorcery past the Revolution. The problem of klikushestvo (the shrieking ailment) in particular comes to mind. As Linda Ivanits explains in Russian Folk Belief, klikushestvo is "primarily a woman's condition characterized by howling, cursing, and falling to the ground during the liturgy, in the midst of church processions, or in the presence of icons, incense, and other religious objects," and usually signifies demonic possession brought on by malevolent sorcery. It was considered distinct from "hysteria" by peasants and doctors alike, and did not merit the same treatment. 

Not all holy fools were prone to loud outbursts or wild displays in church, but some certainly were. According to Ivanits, klikushestvo was a well-known ailment in villages throughout the Empire, with records of klikushi (shriekers) going back to the 16th century.   

The difficulty of distinguishing holiness from sin is almost definitionally present when studying iurodstvo, but concerns about witchcraft, hysteria, and the suspicion with which female wanderers must have been regarded makes those who were known as holy fools during or shortly after their lifetimes all the more incredible. Even the gift of prophesy, often cited to legitimize the holiness of the fool (and which Xenia, for example, is always noted to have had), was far from universally regarded as one given by God.

COMING SOON 

"WILDFLOWERS OF GOD: Rebellion and the Iurodivaya"

Potentially but not definitely including some or all of the following (and probably some things not even listed)...

• Hell's Angels? the inherently transgressive nature of iurodstvo
• All the world's a stage: transvestitism among the saints
• That ain't a tiara: marriage and martyrdom in Orthodoxy
• Neither Jew nor Greek, neither Cuban cigar nor light cigarette: why aren't there more female saints?

As always, questions and comments wholeheartedly encouraged!

*"Кто меня знал, да помянет мою душу для спасения свой души." - carved on St Xenia's gravestone.

**Didn't even notice the name until I looked to link back! Dear Batiushka John really is everywhere. This is, interestingly, a Moscow Patriarchate Church in Hamburg, Germany, with quite an interesting history: 

"In 2004 the Gnadenkirche [Grace church] church in the center of the city came to [converted to; joined] our parish. The miracle of gaining a large congregation in our own home in Hamburg was made possible by longstanding good relations between the Evangelical Church of Germany and the Orthodox Church of Russia. The parish bought the church land in Hamburg and transferred it for a nominal fee - 1 euro." (В 2004 г. церковь Гнаденкирхе в центре города перешла нашему приходу. Чудо обретения многочисленной общиной своего дома в Гамбурге стало возможным благодаря давним добрым отношениям между Евангелической Церковью Германии и Православной Церковью России. Приход выкупил земельный участок под храмом у города Гамбурга, а само здание было передано за символическую плату – 1 евро.) 

The story of both this building and the parishes its housed is fascinating to me; remind me to do a post focusing on it soon if I forget!

[TSE] Holiness or Heresy: Evolving Models of Iurodstvo in Medieval Russia

Notes for the Reader

Excerpts will be posted unedited; will post my own commentary at the end. All senior essay related posts will be tagged "Batiushka Ioann". Footnotes will appear at the bottom of each excerpt. Prologue here.
Questions, critiques, and reactions of any kind warmly encouraged; I am looking to strengthen and improve. Please remember that this is essentially a hastily written draft.
Writing about theology and Church history as an inexperienced believer for a secular academic audience is harrowing. Don't ignore weaknesses and errors, particularly if they could be interpreted as heretical or blasphemous, but be cognizant of my constraints.

II. Holiness or Heresy: Evolving Models of Iurodstvo in Medieval Russia

The tradition of holy foolishness, a particularly enigmatic genre of sanctity, originates in the Gospel itself; Paul of Tarsus mentions a connection between foolishness and the Divine several times in his First Letter to the Corinthians, but of particular relevance is this passage: “Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.”7 The lived tradition of foolishness-for-Christ began in Byzantium, but it was in medieval Muscovy that the practice became most well-known. The Russian holy fool (iurodivyi) soon took on a particular role: he was not merely a man conquering pride through madness and humiliation, but “a form of divine control over the state authorities.”8 This other-worldly rebuke of secular power is famously illustrated in the confrontation between Nicholas of Pskov and Tsar Ivan IV, in which the fool sends the Tsar a piece of bloody meat to chastise him for his massacres. Importantly (in legend, if not in historical fact), Ivan repents, and orders the city spared.

By the seventeenth-century, however, the protective aura of dread and wonder that had largely shielded the iurodivye from institutional persecution had begun to dissipate. Patriarch Iosif in 1646 barred them from entering churches, “since their shouting and squealing prevents Orthodox Christians from hearing the divine chanting, and they come into God’s churches like robbers, carrying sticks…”9  Instructive is the story of another Sergiev, called Ioann the Big-Cap of Moscow, whose life provides an example of the interplay between temporal authority and manifestation of holiness.

He was born around 1670 into a peasant family and spent most of his life wandering from monastery to monastery. Unlike many holy fools, it seems that he wanted to become a monk. Because of Peter I’s ecclesiastical reforms, Ioann, as an illiterate peasant, was prohibited from being tonsured—unless he could convince the highest court to grant an exception and obtain a Synodal dispensation. As Aleksandr Lavrov notes, “one may well wonder how an illiterate could ever have obtained the latter. For most people, therefore, the path to monastic asceticism was simply closed. For this reason, in examining religious recluses…we must consider as motives not only a certain sense of footloose self-determination but also the pressure exerted by the dominant religious culture that forced them to adopt alternative ways.”10  Unlike his forbears in iurodstvo, Ioann rarely ran afoul of authority, and was generally accepting of whatever treatment he was given: after the signing into law of a new regulation demanding that “there be no truck with anchorites and sanctimonious men with matted locks,” the Bishop of Vologda ordered him shorn, a castigation to which he meekly submitted.11 Nor could he be accused of heresy or schismatic sympathies: he regularly confessed and took Communion, and in spite of the tumultuous Sobor of 1666-7 in which the Old Believers were anathematized, he swore that he “recognized no schism” and “crossed himself with three fingers and not with two.”12 It seems that he was marked as a holy fool only by his heavy chains, iron cap, and aimless wanderings. All this notwithstanding he was captured in 1733 and “returned to his place of registration.”13

What happened in the 150 years separating Nicholas and Ioann? Despite late Muscovy’s low literacy rate (Gary Marker, estimating generously, pegs it below ten percent), highly public liturgical services combined with mass migration spurred by the Time of Troubles to disseminate tales of iurodstvo throughout and across cities and villages.14 As popular veneration grew, the Church became increasingly wary, striking names from prayer-books and speaking out publicly against the visible and behavioral markers characteristic of the iurodivye.15 Their renown was beginning to spread beyond her reach, and not in ways she welcomed. In Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, Sergey Ivanov quotes the testimony of many foreign travelers to Russia who were surprised by the free reign given the iurodivye; some, like Isaac Massa, openly pitied the Russians for their gullibility: “…if I was the tsar I would order the last rite for her before it was my turn; but these Muscovites consider her holy; which is not surprising, since—alas—they are still mired in ignorance. May God enlighten them!”16

More serious are scenes from the iurodivye vitae in which they commit unpredictable acts of violence, such as Prokopii of Viatka killing an infant “to resurrect it later” and holding a knife to his confessor’s throat, or Simon of Iurevets strangling a priest with his bare hands.17 While in some sense these stories warn the faithful of the fundamental incomprehensibility of the fool’s actions, in another they are deeply subversive: “regardless of how the hagiographer tries to explain it—aggression against the priest is semantically significant as a sign of rebellion against the Church.”18

Here we see the tension between hagiography and mere narrative. The earliest holy fools were relatively isolated examples of eccentric holiness, fantastic aberrations that inspired awe and served as a kind of memento mirari, but as stories of their exploits were collected into vitae and became reified into a particular model for communing with the Divine, they took on the normativity of other saints’ lives, opening the door for ever increasing numbers of feral, bullheaded vagrants to roam the kingdom. Ivanov notes that “the emergence of at least one local iurodivyi almost inevitably called forth a wave of imitators.”19

While the prelates struggled to manage the destabilizing effects of popular iurodstvo, the iurodivye themselves were transforming. The first iurodivaya (female holy fool) appeared during the reign of Boris Godunov (1585-1598); like Nicholas of Pskov, she was wholly unafraid of anyone, including the tsar, and would often foretell future events.20 Despite the similarities, the modern observer must understand the strangeness of an isolated sixteenth-century woman taking on what had been an exclusively male role, particularly in an era still so concerned with sorcery that an explicit renunciation of it was included in the oath of allegiance to the tsar.21 Around the same time we also see hermits and nuns counted among the iurodivye—the inclusion of hermits is especially bizarre, since perhaps the defining characteristic of a holy fool is that he be among people—whether to humiliate himself, rebuke those around him, warn them of danger, or even simply arouse in them confusion or astonishment, but he that works to shut himself away from others, whether sane or mad, cannot properly be named among the iurodivye.

To more thoroughly understand how the holy fool changed throughout the seventeenth-century, it is instructive to break him down into his constituent parts. As previously established, he must be among people(“the world would rather have nothing to do with this madman, but he keeps on imposing himself on the world,”), he must be fearless (although he need not be aggressive or violent), and he may have special powers of prophesy, which he will use to warn the faithful, rebuke the sinful, prompt all to repentance, and, upon the fulfillment of prophesies, build confidence in his special relationship with God.22 His is a curious, worldly asceticism—he is almost always utterly impoverished and completely reliant on the charity of those around him, often rejecting it even when offered. He may starve himself, walk about naked or in chains, or incite violence upon himself. Typically he does not form close relationships with anyone, but he may have a spiritual confessor in whom he trusts and around whom he is at peace (though, as noted earlier, there’s no guaranteeing the safety of such confessors). He may wander across entire regions or stay within a particular village, but he does not own property, and incredibly rarely would he have any rank to speak of. He may or may not be schismatic; he may or may not be literate (though the latter is admittedly quite rare).

In short, he bears within him elements of the charismatic, ascetic, monastic, pastoral, apocalyptic, thaumaturgic, martyric—all that seem to be missing are the hermetic and the hieratic, curiously enough two opposite poles themselves, and yet their marked absence circumscribe who may or may not be called a holy fool. Now when in the seventeenth-century iurodivye adopt the wearing of fetters, a particular Russian modification to the tradition, we can contextualize the innovation somewhere between wholly irrelevant and paradigm shattering. Ivanov writes, “Byzantine holy fools did not wear fetters. That fetters came to seem necessary is a measure of the fading of that special aura which had earlier surrounded indecency and hooliganism in themselves. Thus later holy foolery sought new forms of legitimation.”23

That a holy fool might not only desire legitimation, but consciously hit upon how to secure it, might reasonably elicit no small degree of suspicion about the whole enterprise. However, when understood in light of, say, his prophetic role, it makes sense that somewhere he maintains a sense, not of dignity, but of whether and to what degree he is fulfilling his purpose.

Just as the iurodivye may seek irons to brace their message and purify themselves for their mission, the hagiographers understand that they, too, must bear the responsibility of effective communication, instead of hoping dumbly that they will be understood. Thus is explained, for example, the replacement of archaic names with more familiar ones in the seventeenth-century reprinting of a particular story about a monk and the Archangel Michael.24 Archbishop Feofan (Prokopovich) of Novgorod, Peter I’s chief apologist, likewise understood the potentially subversive power of the saints: hoping to marginalize what he deemed unacceptable models, regardless of existing traditions of veneration, he “ridiculed not only the holy fools of his day but even those already extolled by the Church as having been pleasing to God.”25

And so the reader of the hagiography is not one, but at least three conceptual steps from the saint himself—his idea of the saintly model is based on the text, but colored by his own associations and biases; the text is whatever happens when the hagiographer’s particular knowledge, abstract ideal, and writing skill intersect, and alone of the three that particular knowledge itself is nothing more than the memory of how the saint chose to present himself, he himself mediating his holiness through his preconceived ideas of piety, sanctity, and the good. Throw in hundreds of years between subject and scribe, or thousands of miles, or both; let the writer be ineloquent, uneducated, and myopic—or selfish, manipulative, and bright, or anything but a saint himself, and one might wonder how it is the Church has consistent models at all not drawn directly from Scripture (not that that isn’t fraught either, as some Protestants will attest). Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra explains:

But the life of a saint cannot be reduced to an article in a Dictionary of Biography or to a chapter in Church History; it is a verbal icon of the saint that, while telling the story as accurately as possible, lets the hidden aspect of the work of the Grace of God in the saint shine through. Just as an icon can only be venerated in the context of worship with the appropriate dispositions, so the life of a saint can only be read in the Church with the eyes of faith and not according to the criteria of secular scholarship. … Although in the life of ascesis and inner prayer (noera prosevchi) all forms of imagination are excluded, our tradition, seeing how strong imagination and representation are within our nature in its fallen state, makes its own their power, which for man without God is a source of division, and transfigures them in iconography and in hagiography, so that they become a genuine means of entering into communion with God and with His saints.26

The Church therefore protects her models, but does so through active contemplation and consciously particular forms of veneration. Archimandrite Justin Popovich calls the lives of the saints “applied dogmatics… In reality they are the testimonies of the Acts of the Apostles, only continued throughout the ages.”27 Veneration of a saint takes many forms, as Hieromonk Damascene (Christensen) writes, “Besides our private prayers for them, the Church offers us many other ways of communing with them as our friends and honoring them as our preceptors. We sing their troparia, we venerate their icons, we perform services to them, and with a blessing from a Bishop we can even compose services in their honor.”28

The lowly parish priest, however, has rarely been recognized as one of the “gold and precious stones that adorn the raiment of the Bride.”29 If he is considered it all, it is only in light of the necessity of his function. He is a man with a job, in fact, a man constituted solely of his job—one that is sometimes sacerdotal, sometimes pastoral, but nothing of particular interest. The historical Orthodox white priest is reduced broadly to the political and ecclesiological regulations circumscribing his sphere of influence and setting the boundaries of his quality of life. The much-noted absence of glorified white priests prior to Father John’s certainly contributes to this—there are no vitae, no folk stories. But what did the priests themselves make of their vocation, particularly if, as (Saint) Justin Popovich explains, “the Lives of the Saints contain in themselves Orthodox ethics in their entirety,”?30 The intense debates surrounding the nature of the clerical caste beginning in earnest in the early nineteenth century show a church wrestling with the nature of the sacerdotal genre: trying to overcome its lowly status, arrive at an agreed upon mission and purpose, and make of a hodgepodge of canon law and worldly regulation a relevant and inspiring model.

- - - - - - - - - -

7. The King James Bible, I Cor 3:18-19.

8. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 285.

9. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 311.

10. Lavrov, Aleksandr. "Witchcraft and Religion in Russia, 1700–1740." Russian Studies in History 45.4 (2007): 23.

11. Lavrov, Aleksandr. "Witchcraft and Religion in Russia, 1700–1740." Russian Studies in History 45.4 (2007): 26.

12. Lavrov, Aleksandr. "Witchcraft and Religion in Russia, 1700–1740." Russian Studies in History 45.4 (2007): 24.

13. Lavrov, Aleksandr. "Witchcraft and Religion in Russia, 1700–1740." Russian Studies in History 45.4 (2007): 26.

14. Marker, Gary. "Literacy and Literacy Texts in Muscovy: A Reconsideration." Slavic Review 49.1 (1990): 89, Moon, David. "Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia's Frontiers, 1550-1897." The Historical Journal 40.4 Dec. (1997): 859-893.

15. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 309-311.

16. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 312-313.

17. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 324-327.

18. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 326.

19. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 318.

20. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 312.

21. Ivanits, Linda. Russian Folk Belief. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, Inc, 1992: 87.

22. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 357.

23. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 344.

24. Ivanov, Sergey. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 332.

25. Lavrov, Aleksandr. "Witchcraft and Religion in Russia, 1700–1740." Russian Studies in History 45.4 (2007): 27.

26. Makarios of Simonos Petra. The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church. Vol. 1. Chalkidike: Indiktos Publishing Company, 1998. 6 vols.

27. Popovich, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Belmont: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994.

28. Christensen, Damascene. "The Place of Lives of Saints in the Spiritual Life." The Orthodox Word 37.6 Nov. (2001): 261-281.

29. Makarios of Simonos Petra. The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church. Vol. 1. Chalkidike: Indiktos Publishing Company, 1998. 6 vols.

30. Popovich, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Belmont: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994.

- - - - - - - - - -

Commentary

These notes serve two main purposes: to remind me what to fix when I go back and edit, and to seek your input on specific issues of concern to me. They will not always be interesting. 

- I could read and write about holy foolishness all damn day.

- draw parallels between "popular" religion of (some) of the holy fools and Fr John's "populist" liturgical style?

- dissemination of tales of iurodstvo contra various forms of press coverage as Fr John gained nororeity?

- Do I footnote too obsessively? I was never really taught any norms on when not to footnote.

- Every bloody time I read this sentence I have to read it twice to get it right: "Despite late Muscovy’s low literacy rate (Gary Marker, estimating generously, pegs it below ten percent), highly public liturgical services combined with mass migration spurred by the Time of Troubles to disseminate tales of iurodstvo throughout

and across cities and villages." Need to just rewrite it already.

- really like the idea of exploring the tensions between hagiography and narrative/folklore and/or biography. revisit later in paper, expand, something?

- proud of coining the phrase memento mirari. just saying.

- holy fools bred imitators, Fr John (unwittingly) spawned cultist devotees. explore/theorize about difference? social status, press, liturgical role, rural v urban, thaumaturgy.

- parallelism: break down what an Orthodox priest is later in the paper in the way a holy fool is broken down here? not enough focus on what the priesthood is, not enough of a sense of how the paradigm is broken in later sections.

- still love that the wearing of irons is a specifically Russian mod.

- do I veer too much into apologetics?

- should I explain what sainthood means in Orthodoxy? probably.
- the enthusiasm of this quote always makes me smile: "We sing their troparia, we venerate their icons, we perform services to them, and with a blessing from a Bishop we can even compose services in their honor." Is it wrong to picture a hieromonk jumping up and down at the thought of writing a service for a favorite saint, or even while reflecting that his Church might allow him to? Took restraint not to make that period an exclamation point.
- do I need to explain that "glorification" and "canonization", and sometimes "veneration", in context of discussion of saints, mean the same thing? is it on me to explain how Orthodox theology of sainthood differs from the Catholic understanding? ergh. the differences aren't even constant across decades and Churches. 

[The Senior Essay] Introduction

Notes for the Reader
Excerpts will be posted unedited; will post my own commentary at the end. All senior essay related posts will be tagged "Batiushka Ioann". Footnotes will appear at the bottom of each excerpt. Prologue here.
Questions, critiques, and reactions of any kind warmly encouraged; I am looking to strengthen and improve. Please remember that this is essentially a hastily written draft.
Writing about theology and Church history as an inexperienced believer for a secular academic audience is harrowing. Don't ignore weaknesses and errors, particularly if they could be interpreted as heretical or blasphemous, but be cognizant of my constraints.

Icon & Iconographer:

Father John of Kronstadt and the Emergence of Sacerdotal Sanctity in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia

I. Introduction

In Dionysius of Fourna’s eighteenth-century iconography manual, one finds a curious instruction: “Draw a monk crucified on a cross, clothed in a tunic and a monk’s hat, barefoot and with his feet nailed to the footrest of the cross; his eyes are closed and his mouth shut. Just above his head is the inscription: ‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.’”1 He continues, describing the monk’s chest, stomach, legs, and so on, at each point specifying a different prayer (“Create in me a clean heart… Prepare your feet in the Gospel of Peace…”), before explaining how to depict “the all-devouring Hell,” the “Maker of lust,” “Death and the grave,” and finally Christ Himself, above the Cross. “Then write this title: The life of the true monk.”2

It makes for a striking icon, not just because the monk is in place of Christ, but because he is no particular monk at all. He is a cipher, an image to which all monks must aspire (and indeed this icon is most commonly found just outside monastic refectories). More than most this icon highlights the monastic genre of holiness—it is a didactic icon, not meant for veneration of and communion with any individual saint, but for contemplation of and instruction in the ways of a particular model of sanctity.

It is commonly heard among Orthodox Christians that saints are living icons, and in fact it is with this idea that Nadieszda Kizenko begins her recent biography of John Sergiev, the renowned “Father John of Kronstadt”, who was glorified as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in 1964, and by the Russian Orthodox Church herself in 1990.3 He is now remembered best as a sort of latter day defender of “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality,” the reactionary cultural program championed by Tsar Nicholas I and his Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov, so counter to the revolutionary atmosphere that surrounded Father John in the last years before his death in 1908.4 Yet to reduce the complexity of his life to a flat religious conservatism is to ignore his greatest “creation”, as Kizenko puts it: the salvation of his own soul.5

As the son of a sacristan and a graduate of the St Petersburg Theological Academy, Father John was certainly familiar with the communion of saints and the depth and variety of holiness manifest thereby—despite this, he seems to have forged his own path to sanctity, eventually becoming the first parish priest to be venerated by the Russian Church.

This together with his many other idiosyncrasies (matrimonial virginity, living thaumaturgy, ascetic priesthood) has contributed to the idea that he is sui generis, or at least something approaching the founder of a new genre of sanctity. In 1909 Archbishop Nikanor (Kamensky) of Kazan wrote of him that “because people are different now, they need to be acted upon in new ways that are peculiar to them.”6 Even within his own era he was widely recognized as a breaker of established categories of religious life, and the wonder and confusion attendant on his ‘boldness before paradigm’ continues to this day. Yet a historical examination of the evolution of other genres of blessedness reveals that Father John’s trajectory was actually quite in keeping with the meta-tradition of expressive flexibility present in the Church since her founding. Genres of holiness, like icons, are didactic, and evolve, reify, and dissolve in response to the unpredictable contingencies of human society—they are models to be appropriated and internalized by the faithful, not for the sake of orthopraxy, but to guide them towards the fullness of right belief.

- - - - - - - - - -                             

1. Dionysius of Fourna. The 'Painter's Manual' of Dionysius of Fourna. Torrance: Oakwood Publications, 1990.
2. Dionysius of Fourna. The 'Painter's Manual' of Dionysius of Fourna. Torrance: Oakwood Publications, 1990.
3. Kizenko, Nadieszda. A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000:1.
4. Pipes, Richard. Russian Conservatism and Its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005: 99.
5. Kizenko, Nadieszda. A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000:183.
6. Kizenko, Nadieszda. A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000: 184.
- - - - - - - - - -
Commentary

These notes serve two main purposes: to remind me what to fix when I go back and edit, and to seek your input on specific issues of concern to me. They will not always be interesting. 

- I hate the title. The paper was already a few days late when I wrapped it up, so I put down the first thing that came to mind and ran it over to the Slavic Department. My working title was "Living Icons, Dead Saints", but that sounded vaguely blasphemous to me.

СТАРЧЕСТВО ДОСТОЙНОЕ ИЗОБРАЖЕНИЕ 

- Came upon the monk icon entirely by happenstance: I was in the stacks rummaging about for books on the rural clergy and found a big gorgeous book almost entirely of full color illustrations of icons and liturgical art. It was in Russian, but I checked it out anyway. I'd flip through it when I wanted a distraction and stopped short the first time I saw the crucified monk. An ingenious friend of mine found a high quality PDF of the entire book online despite not speaking a word of Russian, and weeks later, when I was struggling to think of a hook to get the essay started, the crucified monk came back to me. Read more about this kind of icon here, and email me if you'd like a larger version of the image to the right.

- I usually like to have clever subheadings for each section.

- There are many formatting/style issues. Inconsistencies off the top of my head: whether and where to capitalize words like saint, icon, communion, church, and pronouns referring to God; how to refer to clergy; transliteration of names and words left untranslated; whether to translate names. Input from anyone with experience writing about the Church concerning academic writing conventions will be much appreciated.

- Don't like the word "founder" here: "at least something approaching the founder of a new genre of sanctity". Something like "herald" or "vanguard" is closer.

- Overall this is a very vague introduction and doesn't actually explain much about the essay (this will become clearer as you read more chapters). This is because I myself didn't know much about the essay when I wrote it, but once the rest of the essay is swept through and edited, it can be fixed.

"The unassumed is unhealed."

A second glimpse is given us at the Crucifixion, when Christ cries out with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46). Once again, full weight should be given to these words. Here is the extreme point of Christ's desolation, when he feels abandoned not only by men but by God. We cannot begin to explain how it is possible for one who is himself the living God to lose awareness of the divine presence. But this at least is evident. In Christ's Passion there is no play-acting, nothing is done for outward show. Each word from the Cross means what it says. And if the cry "My God, my God..." is to signify anything at all, it must mean that at this moment Jesus is truly experiencing the spiritual death of separation from God. Not only does he shed his blood for us, but for our sakes he accepts even the loss of God.

"He descended into hell," (Apostles' Creed). Does this mean merely that Christ went to preach to the departed spirits during the interval between Great Friday evening and Easter morning (see 1 Pet. 3:19)? Surely it has also a deeper sense. Hell is a point not in space but in the soul. It is the place where God is not. (And yet God is everywhere!) If Christ truly "descended into hell", that means he descended into the depths of the absence of God. Totally, unreservedly, he identifies himself with all man's anguish and alienation. He assumed it into himself, and by assuming it he healed it. There was no other way he could heal it, except by making it his own.

- Metr Kallistos (Ware), The Orthodox Way

Who needs swords

"One of the more attractive features of Orthodox education was the rich musical heritage of the church. Thousands of parish choirs were formed in the 1890s with special funds from the Synod to enhance the worship and cultural life of the masses and to impress the non-Orthodox and non-Russian populations of the empire. 

Synod Education Commission authorities were gratified to see Old Believer populations in the Urals and along the Volga gradually ceasing to resist official liturgies connected with school affairs and to see thousands of Catholic and Lutheran children enroll in Orthodox schools in the western and Baltic provinces, attracted by the opportunities provided by choral singing societies."

- James Cunningham, A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905-1906

The Old Catholics

The Old Catholics, led by Johann von Döllinger, archbishop of Munich, refused to accept the definition of papal infallibility made in 1871 by the First Vatican Council. A small group, confined mainly to southern Germany and Switzerland, broke with Rome, but they were not able to effect a reversal of the doctrine or persuade other Catholics in general. Prior to World War I, Russian church figures such as Alexander A. Kireev and Archpriest Pavel Svetlov, a professor at the Kiev Theological Academy, worked to bring the Old Catholics into union with the Russian church--a kind of reverse Unia. The war ended their attempts, however, and Old Catholicism faded into irrelevance.

- James Cunningham, A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905-1906

Owning up to...possession

When malice against anyone is roused in your heart, then believe with your whole heart that it is the work of the Devil working in your heart: hate him and his brood, and malice will leave you. (Do not acknowledge it as anything of your own, and do not sympathise with it.) This is from experience. Unfortunately, the Devil shelters himself behind us, and conceals himself, whilst we are blind, and, thinking we are doing everything of ourselves, begin to stand up for the Devil's works as if they were our own, as if for something just, although every idea of there being any justice in our passion is entirely false, impious, and hurtful. Guide yourself by the same rule also in regard to others. When you see that anybody bears malice against you, do not consider his malice as his own doing; no, he is only the passive instrument of the evil one; he has not yet recognised his flattery and is deceived by him. Pray to God that the enemy may leave him and that the Lord may enlighten the eyes of his heart, darkened by the poisonous, noxious breathing of the spirit of evil. We must pray fervently for all those subjected to passions, for the enemy works within them.

Saint John of Kronstadt

My Life in Christ can be read in its entirety for free here, incidentally. I'll start posting less edifying things soon, no worries.

Omniscience: not an excuse to stop calling

Many do not pray because it seems to them that they did not receive any gift from God when they prayed before, or because they consider praying unnecessary; they say that God knows everything without our asking, and forget that it is said: "Ask, and it shall be given unto you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." Our requests (prayers) are necessary expressly to strengthen our faith, through which alone can we be saved. "By grace are we saved through faith." "O woman, great is thy faith." For this reason the Lord made the woman pray earnestly, in order to awaken her faith and to strengthen it. Such men do not see that they have no faith--the Christian's most precious inheritance, which is as necessary as life itself--that they "make Him a liar" by their unbelief, and that they are the children of the Devil, unworthy of any of God's mercies; that they are going to destruction. It is also necessary that our hearts should burn during prayer with a desire for spiritual blessings, with love to God, and that we should vividly represent to ourselves His extreme mercy to mankind, and His readiness to hear all our prayers with fatherly love. "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father, which is in heaven, give good things to them that ask him?"

- Saint John of Kronstadt

Some late night blasphemy

Father John's My Life in Christ has been sitting in my bag for about a week. It is nearly 600 pages long, and I should've finished it by Wednesday morning. It is now 4:30am on Thursday and I am on page 17. Mind you, I've already read an entire, rather detailed biography of Father John, which made him out to be, quite rightly, a very interesting figure. But in these 17 pages I've gone from being devastatingly and impossibly bored by this book to nearly furious with it, which strikes me as a less than ideal attitude to take to the work of a Saint, so I'm giving voice to my frustrations here, and perhaps one of you can lead me back.

If My Life in Christ is in any way organized, its organization is not apparent to me. Whether it was written as a collection of personal reflections and edited at the end of his life (it was published while he was alive), written expressly for publication in one furious bout, whether it's a journal from which all dates and narrative anchors have been removed, I do not know. It appears, to me, to be 600 pages of musings on the Gospels, Sacraments, and prayer. It doesn't feel particularly theological, insofar as the language, while heavy with scriptural references, is fairly loose and frustratingly imprecise and open to a variety of interpretations, and its suggestions and urgings for more earnest prayer and attentiveness to God at all times and so on seem at times trite and formulaic. 

The passage that pushed me from irritated boredom into anger follows:

"The miraculous effect of the life-giving Cross upon our souls, tortured by the poison of evil, proves to us most undoubtedly and clearly: (1) That we have indeed a soul, a spiritual being; (2) That there are evil spirits, harming our souls; (3) That God exists and our Lord Jesus Christ, and that He is always with us through His Divinity; and (4) That He has indeed accomplished our salvation by His sufferings and death on the Cross, and has destroyed the power of the Devil by means of the Cross. How many proofs of the advantage of our faith there are in the wonderful action upon us of the life-giving Cross alone! Glory be to the Christian faith!"

For whom are such words written? To whom are such words convincing? Are they for those already firm in their faith? Are they for Father John himself? Are they for the doubter? Are they a rhetorical flourish? They're certainly not for the heretics, the unbelievers, the lost. Father John died in 1908; he did not have the luxury of living in Christian ubiquity (though really, who did?). I certainly don't expect every work to be an apologia, but time and again I wonder why is there so much willful naivete, blindness, false consciousness, in so much Christian writing? Yes, there are works to which we can turn for strength, examples to which we ought look to show the way, but I am frustrated.

My gut says I am frustrated because Father John "got away with" saying things my atheist friends would never let me say without expecting full exegesis including metaphysics, Christology, ecclesiology, Church history, and rebuttals of whatever cockamaimey strawmen of Christianity they've picked up in the past twenty years (which, let me tell you, 99.99% of the time, I cannot deliver). They end up scornful and disdaining both me and Christianity; I end up writhing in self-hatred and dreading with a fear and a loathing my soul has rarely known the next inevitable interrogation. My mind says he didn't "get away" with anything; he simply had a courage and a boldness I lack (and certainly a much sounder and fuller theological education). I suppose I'm just (unfairly) disappointed that, at least in this book, he's not giving me much in the way of ammunition, and perhaps even incredibly unjustly ashamed, knowing, as I do, that if atheists read this it would be more likely to turn them away than make them think again.

"Why does the Lord allow there to be poor? For your good, so that you may be cleansed from your sins and expiate them, 'for alms doth deliver from death, and shall purge away all sin'; so that you may win suppliants who will pray for you in the persons of those upon whom you bestow your charity, so that the Lord may be merciful to you. 'Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.'

Why does the Lord allow people to be poor? For the same reason, amongst others, that He does not make you righteous all at once according to your wish. God might have made all men well off, even rich; but then a great forgetfulness of God would have arisen, and pride, envy, etc., would have increased. And you would have thought too highly of yourself had the Lord made you soon righteous. But as sin humbles you, showing you your great infirmity, impurity, and constant need of God and His grace, so likewise the poor man is humbled by poverty and his need of other people. If the poor were to be enriched, many of them would forget God and their benefactors, would ruin their souls in the luxury of this world. So destructive are riches, and so do they blind the spiritual vision! They make the heart gross and ungrateful!"

Does it make me a hopeless modern that the first paragraph leaves me uneasy? Perhaps. Even the second one seems to veer dangerously toward, "they're poor because they are particularly broken, and need this extra special cross to compensate," which I know cannot be what he is suggesting, because to suggest that anyone deserves poverty seems to chafe against the idea that all material things are His, and none of us have any real claim to any of them, which is why we ought help them from their poverty, which Father John himself did probably with more fervor and success than any one of his contemporaries. It is apparent to anyone with even a basic understanding of Christianity that we do not laud material comfort and acquisitiveness, but isn't poverty most fruitful when knowingly chosen? I don't understand his purpose in discussing all these easily confused ideas at once, right after suggesting that the poor exist only for the salvation of the wealthy, which, again, cannot be what he meant.

I have no real basis for complaint, because even though I grow more and more confused with each passing day, honestly I do very little to try to find clarity, precision, understanding. So here's hoping, then, that this petty wrath of mine will lead to something a bit better down the road, now that I've set this all down.

-----

Edit: reading the first passage I quoted over again, I think I simply resented his joy. I really have nothing to say to that.

Was it chain letters in 19th century Russia? (Yes.)

Turns out my thesis might focus quite a bit on Batiushka Ioann, so settle in for the long haul.

O Jesus Christ, we pray to Thee, Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on all Thine world from all perishing. Thou hast redeemed our souls from sin by Thy blood. O, Pre-Eternal God, thine mercy is great, for the sake of Thy most pure Blood, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. 

The condition of the prayer is this: whoever has this prayer has to pass it along to nine persons and to read it at least once a day with faith. Then you will be freed of every evil and misfortune, and if you don't do it, you will be subjected to evil and misfortune. 

- a chain letter from 1890, purportedly containing one of Father John's "secret, effective" prayers 

(he repeatedly and publicly, in print and in person, denounced all such letters)

TS: BLGF III

"Often I wonder whether I would be able to suffer for my principles if the need came, and it strikes me as a matter of the highest importance. That should not be so. I should ask myself with far greater urgency whether I have done everything possible to carry those principles into effect, and how I can attain power to make them absolutely victorious. But those questions I put only with my mind. They do not excite my guts, which wait anxiously while I ponder my gift for martyrdom."

Happy hump day!

Addendum

One more thing about the Christian/Atheist Turing Test I mentioned here-- y'all free to speculate as to which entry is mine, though please do so in comments here and not at Leah's blog, as she doesn't want "too much homogenization of beliefs". For what it's worth there was a significant period of my life when I was an atheist, and an agnostic, and back and forth between the two, and my answers were written based on how I remember thinking about things then, and actual conversations I've had with atheists.

All told, however, it was a very eye-opening experience. More once the experiment is done. Will be writing my sincere answers today-- that entry will be pretty easily identifiable, I imagine!

Remember, voting ends Sunday!

Unequally Yoked's Turing Test

I'm one of the 15 participants in Leah's ideological Turing Test, in which each of us answers two sets of questions-- one as an atheist, and the other as a Christian. All of the answers are posted anonymously, and now you, dear readers, can vote for which entries you think were written by actual atheists. 

Vote here.

In a world full of people, only some want to fly, isn't THAT crazy?

Leah writes:

"Plenty of my Christian friends subscribe to theologies that strongly imply I will go to hell when I die, but they don't feel compelled to evangelize to me, and, if pressed on the point, tend to adopt a somewhat wishy-washy position ('I can't know what God will do') or just wave their hands and say 'I guess the Church teaches you're going to Hell, but I don't think I can do anything about it. It's up to God.'"

This, combined with Elizabeth Scalia's recent post about the relationship between faith and reason, have prompted me to delve more deeply into my crypto-fideism. Fair warning: Waits's "Lowside of the Road" is a pretty good picture of my mental landscape on this topic, so fasten your seatbelt.

Conversations about ethics bore me. Increasingly, I find them not only boring, but unilluminating, and often even counter-productive. This is because I think it is impossible to conceive of morality in terms of laws. I really liked Simcha Fisher's post on the difficulty of discerning when natural family planning is appropriate because I think it gets at why the hyper-legalistic approach is untenable, cruel, absurd, and even contrary to the Christian conception of man and his relationship to God: "But why doesn’t the Church give some specific examples of what qualifies as a just reason? Well, one problem is that my just reason is not necessarily the same as your just reason. ...if the Church seems distressingly vague, it’s because she doesn’t want to get in the way of the conversation you could be having with God. He doesn’t want to talk to The Church as a whole: He wants to talk to you."

This may strike some as getting perilously close to relativism, or at least some kind of very low church protestantism-- if you forget that Christianity is first and foremost about the Christian's relationship with Christ. He, not the Church, not the Ten Commandments, not the Golden Rule, is "the Way and the Truth and the Life". Every relationship man has is unique-- our love for each other in every instance manifests differently, and Christ, being human, is no different. I think this is because only in perfection is there true unity and oneness, and man while on earth is inescapably imperfect. Our imperfection necessarily fractures all of us in different ways, and the variety in magnitude and diversity of the fractures demand different bonds to repair us and bring us closer to one another and to Him.

We need a Church because we are so confused and broken that we cannot simply look upon Christ and know the Truth. The Church helps us to know those who are perhaps less fractured, or fractured differently, so that we can begin the infinite and difficult process of mending ourselves. I think seeking directly and radically to emulate Christ in all things is a fool's errand-- we cannot ignore His Divinity. It's sort of like the novice monk doing 500 prostrations a day, or trying to subsist on nothing but locusts and the rain. He hasn't worked his way up to that level of ascesis, he can't be trusted, or expected, to understand it, and in so trying he perverts the practice and ends up worse off than when he started. The first time I read The Brothers Karamazov it pushed me from agnosticism to atheism because I was 12 years old and clearly not ready for it. If you try to lift a hundred pound weight and in so doing injure yourself, you won't even be able to lift twenty.

So we have priests and bishops and patriarchs and monks and saints to help us along, because the sun blinds while the moon illuminates the contours of the desert in the night. Ethics as law make no sense to me because the ethical isn't a list of dos and don'ts, and morality exists nowhere in Big Book of Truth form. The function of ethics is to help me better know how to approach and understand myself.

The first example that comes to mind is when I read somewhere earlier that "God will do what seems repugnant to the world." This is a common sentiment in Christianity-- the Christian ought not be of the world, he ought reject the world, etc. But how much of the world am I? How do I discern what seems repugnant to me because I am fallen and what seems repugnant because of the grace given me by God? I can't bend my will and my desires to the Good-- to Him-- before I actually confront and examine what my will and my desires are.

His law may be written on my heart but I wasn't born literate. Put another way: you can show an American and a Russian the same movie poster, but the former sees "Coat" and the latter "Salt" because they're reading the same symbols as parts of their own alphabets-- and only one of them is reading it as intended.

It's easy to list the virtues and incredibly hard to know how to live them, even if one sincerely wants to (which, really, most of us don't, most of the time). I struggle to know what God wants or expects of me on a day to day basis, so how could I ever presume to know anything about His relationship with anyone else, especially His relationship with someone who doesn't yet acknowledge His existence?

"Thou, simple, ignorant, and humble Russia, stay faithful to the plain, naive gospel wherein eternal life is found, and not the phrase-mongering Aristotle or the obscurity of pagan sciences. Why set up Latin and Polish schools? We have not had them up to now and that has not kept us from being saved!" 

- Ivan Vyshensky, 17th century Ukrainian elder

A lot of the questions I get asked about Christianity seem to boil down to a bizarre kind of absolutism-- most of the conversations end with a "what happens if?" "What happens if the fast is broken?" "What happens if someone throws an icon away?" "What happens if you don't cross yourself?" Perhaps I'm misreading my friends, but they always seem to be looking for a line that, once crossed, will definitively send one to Hell, and if a particular behavior doesn't, they can't seem to understand why it's relevant. I chalk this up, too, to the inability to understand Christianity not as a system but as a relationship. What happens if I don't bum my friend a cigarette? What happens if I forget his birthday? What happens if I steal from him? A friendship can survive many transgressions. That doesn't mean we shouldn't avoid them.

That said the unending chorus of "why" and my own profound ignorance has pushed me into a corner. If I uncharitably interpret Tolstoy to a friend who's never read him, perhaps that friend never reads War and Peace. Uunfortunate, but not life threatening. If I mangle an aspect of theology, whether it's something minor, like why shrimp are acceptable Lenten fare, or something essential, like the role of the Eucharist in salvation, I may push someone farther away from conversion than if I'd said nothing at all.

Thus my crypto-fideism stemmed partly from fear, partly from cowardice (these are distinct), and partly from the sentiment voiced in the Vyshensky quote above. But now I see that sentiment as affirming a different sort of absolutism-- certainly many were saved before Aquinas and Augustine and Schmemann and Lossky and even Chrysostom and Irenaeus, but how are we in any way the worse for having them? If there is progress in history it is because of men such as they.

"There is a paradox at work, of course; we apply our reason to what is founded upon unreasonableness (and faith is utterly unreasonable; it is 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen) and then our understanding—slowly hatched open bit by bit, by our own Holy Spirit-prompted willingness to pursue the gift through the giftedness of all who came before—leads us to the point where we can say not only 'I believe this,' but 'I know this in a way that has passed through my intellect, and been absorbed within my tissue,' in the same way that you can say you know how to button your coat, or put a car into forward or reverse: not because you are mindless, but because you have fully absorbed that learning. 

And then you really can be fearless..."

That (from the Scalia post mentioned above), really, is the heart of it for me, and the strongest objection to fideism, crypto or otherwise, I see. Faith independent of reason I think is inextricably bound by fear, especially in the modern world so awash in skepticism and unbound inquiry. It may be true, as Don Colacho says, that "there are many things of which one cannot speak without automatically disfiguring them," and certainly the words of Saint Gregory Nazianzen are worth remembering when he says "not to every one, my friends, does it belong to philosophize about God; not to every one; the Subject is not so cheap and low; and I will add, not before every audience, nor at all times, nor on all points; but on certain occasions, and before certain persons, and within certain limits," but the alternative can't be total silence.

I'm not suggesting theological inquiry or apologetics as a crutch to let us escape the bidding to "preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words," which is certainly a danger, but unwillingness to engage non-Christians on intellectual questions, and unwillingness to prepare for them, strikes me as unfair and even cruel.

So to return to Leah's paragraph above: no, I don't know what God will do, and yes, it is up to Him, and I think she knows that any Christian who says otherwise is probably at the very least confused. But Christianity is, I think, anything but fatalist. To quote the good Don yet again: "The true Christian should not resign himself to the inevitable: he should trust in the impertinence of a repeated prayer." Here again I really like the way Scalia puts it: "the prayer part is absolutely essential, because that is where what you are learning becomes bone-deep; it is the 'setting agent,' as it were."

"I don't know" is a terrifying admission because "on behalf of all and for all" is a terrifying prospect. It's also why every admission of ignorance must be turned from an end into a beginning.