Rod Dreher's Blog, page 636

What Is A Holy Fool?

Evgeny Vodolazkin, the medievalist whose sensational novel, Laurus — which I reviewed here — is set in the world of Middle Ages Russia, explains what a “holy fool” is, and the role such characters play in the Russian religious imagination. Excerpts:

The fool for Christ, or Holy Fool, is similar to a biblical prophet, prescient, but more importantly able to reveal truths. As one church hymn has it, the yurodivy (holy fool in Russian) strives “with imaginary insanity to reveal the insanity of the world.” He not only fights the insanity of everyday sins but the crimes of the mighty as well.

After devastating Novgorod during his reign in the 16th century, Ivan the Terrible moved on toward Pskov. The only person to stand up to him was the yurodivy Nikola Salos. As legend has it, he offered the Tsar a piece of raw meat out of hospitality. Ivan objected that he did not eat meat during the fast; Nikola retorted that the Tsar did a far worse thing in devouring the flesh of Christians. Startled by the encounter, Ivan the Terrible did not touch Pskov, left the people in peace, and instead returned to Moscow.

The fool for Christ, who can still be discovered in contemporary literature and films (such as Pavel Lungin’s “Island”), is someone who has broken away from society. To withdraw into such religious folly is effectively dropping out of mainstream life. It truly is a departure, because a person who chose this path usually left his home region for places where no one knew him.

More:

The fool for Christ is not merely an eccentric. In its highest manifestation, yurodstvo [holy-fool-ness] is a kind of sanctity, but one that shuns any recognition and to this end dons a grotesque mask. It may indeed comprise eccentricity, but this is superficial. It was said of one such man who “by day he laughed at the world, but wept for it by night.”

People occasionally ask me as a historian of medieval culture if contemporary art performances are also expressions of yurodstvo. In my opinion the answer is no, as they are generally devoid of such spiritual meaning, without which there can be no yurodstvo. The fool for Christ charges around yet avoids recognition, while Bohemian artists do not flee from recognition, but rather seek it actively.

Read the whole thing. 

The protagonist of Laurus spends a portion of his life as a holy fool. As I’ve mentioned, I’m re-reading Laurus now, and am going to pay more attention to the holy fool section of the novel, reading it in light of this 2009 review essay by Ralph Wood, of two books about Dostovesky. Excerpts:

Ivan [Karamazov] is the Dostoevskian character who most fully embodies the soul-rending doubts that have become endemic to modern life. Citing the work of Isaiah Berlin, Cicovacki shows that Ivan is wracked by the three most devastating Enlightenment “humiliations” of Christian tradition: (1) the denial that man is the purpose and center of creation; (2) the insistence that man is but a creature of nature like all other animals; and (3) the discovery that reason is not autonomous and objective but subject to overt passions and covert illusions that radically distort its judgments.

Overly simply stated, Cicovacki’s argument is that Dostoevsky does not give typically Western answers to these questions. On the contrary, Dostoevsky is an anti-rationalist who insists, with Alyosha, that it is not only unnecessary but actually impossible to know the meaning of life as a condition for affirming it. In this rather existentialist reading of Dostoevsky, the great Russian is seen as providing a helpfully Eastern vision of life over against a more Western outlook.

The Eastern Church, in Cicovacki’s reading of Dostoevsky, provides the novelist a more intuitive and cyclical view of things than does the rationalist and linear West. Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodoxy is devoted to a mystical sense of the earth as more our mother than our sister; it is committed to the God who is more immanent than transcendent. Dostoevsky regarded life as too contradictory, Cicovacki argues, to be comprehended and lived on strictly rational grounds. As Dostoevsky himself confessed, “there is nothing more fantastic than reality itself.”

More:

Ivan Karamazov ends in cruelty and madness because he will not embrace such a harsh and contradictory world. He demands tounderstandwhy the universe is full of purposeless suffering before he willembraceit.

Dmitri, by contrast, finds newness of life because he gradually discerns, with Alyosha’s help, that God creates a partially indeterminate cosmos in order to leave room for human freedom. Authentic faith is the willingness to affirm the complementarity of good and evil—indeed, to embrace the God “who lacks any discernible essence and who is the God of existence, the God of the mysterious flow of life,” writes Cicovacki.

Dmitri does not search for the meaning of life but the experience of being alive. He does not ask what the meaning of life is but senses that it is he who is being asked. Dmitri understands that he is being questioned by life and that he must answer with his own life. His answer consists in reverence and awe for life—he serves this life without any demands for rights, or pretensions of greatness. Dmitri is the incarnation of the affirmation of life, even in the face of evil. If there is a hero inThe Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri is it.

 

Wood continues to reflect on Truth and Reason in Dostoevsky, as discerned by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury:

Williams’s basic thesis is that, for Dostoevsky, love is always a difficult and often deceptive thing, never something obvious and uncomplicated. On the contrary, it’s the demonic that would make life horribly easy.

Ivan Karamazov’s famous claim that, “if God is dead, then all things are permitted” is much more satanic than the traditional reading indicates. He is not simply stating the rather obvious notion that, if there were no afterlife to guarantee justice for the good and punishment for the evil, then everyone would eagerly serve his own will, all restraint being lifted, all crime becoming legitimate. What he really and terribly means is this: If God is dead, then the ego must occupy his vacant place. In the absence of God, there is no transcendent order for determining the difference between atrocity and beauty, between love and hatred of neighbor, between virtue and vice—except as the solitary self decides. No wonder that Nietzsche, the apostle of autonomous will, declared God to be dead at virtually the same time Ivan was making his own pronouncement.

One more passage:

It follows that Dostoevsky’s Devil is not, like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, a friendly “spirit who negates,” a naughty “imp of the perverse,” who keeps life from becoming an endless Sunday-school picnic of tedious yea-saying. He is, instead, the deceptive specter who leaves us in suspense concerning his own reality or unreality: “We do not know,” Williams declares, “what it is that emerges from our own intelligence [as hallucination] and what is given to us and required of us from beyond ourselves—both the vision of God and the vision of total meaninglessness.”

Yet there is hope for Satan’s final defeat and thus our own undeception. The arch dissembler cannot dwell forever, Williams writes, because “he is locked out from the self-commitment of bodily and temporal life and thus from the self-risking of love.” Though Ivan Karamazov ends in demonic insanity, he at least retains the miserable integrity of his unbelief. Dostoevsky might have enabled him (if he had lived to write his sequel to The Brothers Karamazov) to become a holy fool in the Orthodox tradition—a man who, like St. Basil of Moscow, so totally abandons himself to God that he doesn’t bother to wear clothes.

Please do read the whole essay. And check out this piece telling the story of St. Xenia of St. Petersburg, who is one of the most famous and beloved of all holy fools. It’s astonishing. The only figure in Western Christianity that seems parallel is St. Francis of Assisi, when he stripped naked in the town square to rebuke his father and to declare himself God’s alone.

Laurus, like The Brothers Karamazov, is the kind of book that reveals sanctity and mystery so intensely that it is hard to remain unchanged by it. It’s not a novel that you “figure out”; as you read it, it is also reading you. Here’s a link to ordering it online.

Here’s a link to my interview with author Evgeny Vodolazkin. New York readers of this blog will see at the end of that interview details about the two NYC appearances Vodolazkin is making next week, on Monday and Tuesday, when he’s in town from his home in St. Petersburg.

Peak Gun Crime: Early 1990s

Several readers have pointed to this 2013 Pew study, which I agree is surprising. More than surprising. Excerpt:

National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence plunged through the 1990s, but has declined less dramatically since 2000.

Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults, robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.

Nearly all the decline in the firearm homicide rate took place in the 1990s; the downward trend stopped in 2001 and resumed slowly in 2007. The victimization rate for other gun crimes plunged in the 1990s, then declined more slowly from 2000 to 2008. The rate appears to be higher in 2011 compared with 2008, but the increase is not statistically significant. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall also dropped in the 1990s before declining more slowly from 2000 to 2010, then ticked up in 2011.

Despite national attention to the issue of firearm violence, most Americans are unaware that gun crime is lower today than it was two decades ago. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, today 56% of Americans believe gun crime is higher than 20 years ago and only 12% think it is lower.

More:

Mass shootings are a matter of great public interest and concern. They also are a relatively small share of shootings overall. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics review, homicides that claimed at least three lives accounted for less than 1% of all homicide deaths from 1980 to 2008. These homicides, most of which are shootings, increased as a share of all homicides from 0.5% in 1980 to 0.8% in 2008, according to the bureau’s data. A Congressional Research Service report, using a definition of four deaths or more, counted 547 deaths from mass shootings in the U.S. from 1983 to 2012.

Read the whole thing. It’s important. I don’t know what the numbers are for 2015, but even if they doubled this year, that still makes them a very tiny number of overall gun homicides.

Granted, if you or someone you love dies this way, the statistics are meaningless. But if we are going to make government policy based on reality, not perception, then let’s allow reality to guide us. This is hard to do. As Sam M. keeps pointing out whenever I bring up some aspect of our moral decline, by some meaningful statistical measures, things are much better today than they were decades ago. It doesn’t fit what feels right to me, so I resist those facts. Mind you, I don’t believe those facts are necessarily conclusive, but I concede that they are harder for me to accept because they conflict with what feels true. This is a fault of mine.

There is no easy answer to this problem when rights get in the way of results. When the NYPD followed the Giuliani/Bloomberg era “stop and frisk” policies, they harvested huge numbers of illegal handguns off people on the street. But because the overwhelming majority of those handguns came from black and Hispanic men, liberal critics called the policy racist. The new mayor, Bill DeBlasio, ended it. Gun crime has gone way up. 

In 2013, when NYC was getting ready to elect a new mayor and stop-and-frisk was a big issue, Commentary‘s Seth Mandel argued that liberal critics of stop-and-frisk put civil rights concerns over saving lives. In response, the libertarian writer A. Barton Hinkle pointed out that just because a policy is effective does not make it justifiable, in particular if it violates basic rights. The rights-vs-results tension is critically important, and easy for partisans on both sides of any given issue to downplay, as if the answer were obvious.

 

 

Second Amendment ‘Terrorists’

The New York Daily News goes for broke, again:

The reader who tipped me off says:

I’m not an NRA fan – far from it – but to call their chairman a “terrorist” is not what I’d expect from people claiming to be rational and “reality-based”.

This will all end badly.

Let’s think about this: the front page of the fifth-largest newspaper in America has labeled the strongest defender of Second Amendment rights in the country a “terrorist” — and says he’s no better than ISIS (one of the San Bernardino shooters, it is now reported, had publicly pledged allegiance to ISIS).

I have highly mixed feelings about the NRA, but those feelings are rather less mixed after seeing this. I do not accept the maximalist line that any restriction on guns and ammunition is the start of a slippery slope, and must be firmly rejected. But the idea that a man who advocates for a Constitutionally guaranteed liberty can be denounced not in an Internet comment box, but on the front page of a major American newspaper, as a “terrorist” — that is fairly unnerving to me.

I started to write, “What would the cultural Left say if some right-wing newspaper denounced the head of the ACLU as a ‘terrorist’ because his organization successfully defended unpopular First Amendment freedoms? What would they say if a right-wing newspaper denounced the heads of film studios and record companies as ‘terrorists’ because some of their products glorify extreme violence?”

I know what they would say, and so do you. But here’s the thing: Peggy Noonan observes that factions of the Left are going after the First Amendment too, all in the name of Safety (e.g., “safe spaces” free of opinions and people they would rather not confront):

Americans are growing weary of being told what they can and cannot publicly say, proclaim and think. We all know what’s going on at the colleges, with the mad little Marats and Robespierres who are telling students and administrators what they are and are not allowed to say or do. This is not just kids acting up at this point, it’s a real censorship movement backed by an ideology that is hostile to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It is led by students who, though they managed to get into the greatest universities in the country, seem never to have been taught to love the little amendment that guarantees free speech and free religious observance, the two pillars without which America collapses. And too bad, because when you don’t love something you lose it.

It is my impression that what is happening on the campuses is starting to break through as a real threat to what used to be called normal Americans.

And the “normal Americans,” how are they going to react to this kind of thing when it’s directed at the Second Amendment? Charles C.W. Cooke wants the anti-Second Amendment people to stop bluffing and take action:

When the likes of Rob Delaney and Bill Maher and Keith Ellison say that we need to get rid of the Second Amendment, they are not speaking in a vacuum but reflecting the views of a small but vocal portion of the American population. And they mean it. That being so, here’s the million-dollar question: What the hell are they waiting for? Go on, chaps. Bloody well do it.

Seriously, try it. Start the process. Stop whining about it on Twitter, and on HBO, and at the Daily Kos. Stop playing with some Thomas Jefferson quote you found on Google. Stop jumping on the news cycle and watching the retweets and viral shares rack up. Go out there and begin the movement in earnest. Don’t fall back on excuses. Don’t play cheap motte-and-bailey games. And don’t pretend that you’re okay with the Second Amendment in theory, but you’re just appalled by the Heller decision. You’re not. Heller recognized what was obvious to the amendment’s drafters, to the people who debated it, and to the jurists of their era and beyond: That “right of the people” means “right of the people,” as it does everywhere else in both the Bill of Rights and in the common law that preceded it. A Second Amendment without the supposedly pernicious Heller “interpretation” wouldn’t be any impediment to regulation at all. It would be a dead letter. It would be an effective repeal. It would be the end of the right itself. In other words, it would be exactly what you want! Man up. Put together a plan, and take those words out of the Constitution. It’ll be tough explaining to suburban families that their established conception of American liberty is wrong. You might even suffer at the polls because of it. But that’s what it’s going to take. This will involve hard work, of course. You can’t just sit online and preen to those who already agree with you. No siree. Instead, you’ll have to go around the states — traveling and preaching until the soles of your shoes are thin as paper. You’ll have to lobby Congress, over and over and over again. You’ll have to make ads and shake hands and twist arms and cut deals and suffer all the slings and arrows that will be thrown in your direction. You’ll have to tell anybody who will listen to you that they need to support you; that if they disagree, they’re childish and beholden to the “gun lobby”; that they don’t care enough about children; that their reverence for the Founders is mistaken; that they have blood on their [deleted] hands; that they want to own firearms only because their penises are small and they’re not “real men.” And remember, you can’t half-ass it this time. You’re not going out there to tell these people that you want “reform” or that “enough is enough.” You’re going there to solicit their support for removing one of the articles within the Bill of Rights. Make no mistake: It’ll be unpleasant strolling into Pittsburgh or Youngstown or Pueblo and telling blue-collar Democrat after blue-collar Democrat that he only has his guns because he’s not as well endowed as he’d like to be. It’ll be tough explaining to suburban families that their established conception of American liberty is wrong. You might even suffer at the polls because of it. But that’s what it’s going to take. So do it. Start now. Off you go.

Read the whole epic thing here.

It never seems to pierce the bubble of these liberal ideologues that the NRA is so powerful because it represents a popular cause. Over half of all Americans oppose stricter gun control laws.  I don’t belong to the NRA, and I have no objection in principle to a limited tightening of gun restrictions, but my opinion is not the majority opinion. More importantly, I don’t have strong feelings about the issue, while pro-Second Amendment people tend to have very intense feelings about it. I’m never going to vote for or against a candidate on Second Amendment issues, but I know plenty of people who would, and do. They are my friends and neighbors, and I do not believe them to be terrorists.

I get that the editors of the Daily News, and many others, do consider them to be terrorists. What this designation is going to do is to make them dig in even harder, convinced that the Democratic Party and the liberal media would come take their guns away if they had the chance. It cannot be comfortable for Wayne LaPierre to see himself likened to mass murderers on the front page of a major American newspaper. But the Daily News has just made his job significantly easier.

I don’t vote on the Second Amendment, but I very much vote on the First Amendment, specifically freedom of religion. We have seen over and over liberals in the media, in politics, in academia, and so forth, denounce people like me as “bigots,” the equivalent of racist segregationists, and as the kind of people who make life in American unsafe. I don’t know about my fellow First Amendment fans, but this has made me dig in much deeper, because I’m absolutely convinced that if the Democrats had the power to do so, they would take away as much freedom of religion as they could, because many of them neither practice it nor value it, but instead see it as a threat.

My Mailbag

From my mailbag on a very interesting day. This one comes from a French reader:

What seems to happen is that American liberals have “finally” discovered anticlericalism, which until then was a fixture of the European left. Yes, America is becoming more and more like Europe, and I don’t think it’s progress. Movement conservatives have a lot to answer for on this front, as their zealotry and jingoism ended making once universally shared notions like God or patriotism unpalatable, even disgusting, to a whole generation.

Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail from a white Evangelical who is moderately conservative, and who says he is sinking into an exhausted pessimism:

1. There is nothing we can do to make black activists happy. Yesterday a caller to NPR said that removing traces of slavery and racism required, among other things, renaming Washington, D.C. And at that moment, I gave up. We can elect a black President, remove historical monuments, require race-sensitivity classes, rename streets and schools and cities, and on and on, and there will always be newer demands. And the new demands will always be bigger and will always be made with louder and louder voices. Not only am I likely to stop making a futile effort to be understanding and accommodative, I think I need to stop listening. Can anything be more harmful to a cause than when a sympathetic listener decides to tune out, because he realizes that anything else will be a lifelong waste of his time?

2. Unrelated thought (I hope): With drones, there is no longer a need for suicide bombers. Current tactics require the death of murderous jihadis and the recruitment and indoctrination of new ones for one-off attacks. Soon, the same guys will be able to attack over and over.

3. Guns are hard to acquire in Europe. I read that the ones used in the two Paris attacks were decommissioned guns that amateur gunsmiths turned back into weapons. In the US, give me $1000 and I can get you enough guns and ammunition for one person to kill a hundred people. Give me three or four days, and I can do it legally. For all the talk about the Paris-style attacks being confined to Europe because of proximity and raw numbers of Muslims in-country, the U.S. is a much easier target. We’ve got roughly as many human targets and way, way more guns.

I’m not sold on the Benedict Option, and certainly not the run-for-the-hills caricature of the BenOp, but lately I’m thinking I just want a very large piece of land in the middle of nowhere where I can go and no one will bother me.

I’m somewhere between “il faut cultiver notre jardin” and “the center cannot hold.”

Here’s part of one from a reader commenting on my post about, in part, Steve Inskeep’s long softball interview this morning with a CAIR representative:

It was cringe inducing. I thought to myself, “My God, I can’t imagine NPR giving such free reign and respect to a leading prolife conservative voice after the Colorado Springs shooting.”  

These people have no self respect. If they were taken hostage, they’d be the first to sell out their countryman to save their own a*ses. 

A couple of days ago I was listening to Fresh Air and heard Terry Gross interviewing a couple of black writers. Her overly deferential whiteness was beyond infuriating. I felt really sorry for these guys. They were very interesting, and would have been more so if Gross had not focused almost exclusively on their race, race, race, race, and race. It was, like the Inskeep interview, cringe inducing. I thought to myself, “Who listens to this sh*t?” Answer: Morons like me. 

Hey, reader, I’m worse than you: I actually donate to pay for it!

Talk amongst yourselves.

Of Politicians And Meaningless Gestures

Commenter Richao:

To all the commenters on this thread criticizing Republican candidates for president for not Doing Something, what exactly do you propose that they do? For all of you suggesting that offering thoughts and prayers is somehow meaningless, how is it any more meaningless than, say, this from Hillary: “I refuse to accept this as normal. We must take action to stop gun violence now. -H”? A call for some unspecified “action” is meaningful in what state of the world?

Let’s get down to brass tacks: What is the potential for any politically feasible “action” to materially reduce the future likelihood of these types of mass shootings? Be honest. Be specific. Spell it out for me, because from what I can see, no “action” that Hillary or Obama has proposed would even begin to make a difference. Rather, those proposals would further expand the authority of our already overbearing criminal justice system, as innocent folks, most of them working class, many of them minorities, inadvertently foot-fault into technical violations of ever more complex criminal statutes.

Now, some of you recognize this. You want us to move in the direction of Australia or the UK. Fine. That might actually reduce the number of these types of shootings. Maybe. But just how do you propose to acheive this? You face the dual hurdle of the Second Amendment–which under the current Court would not permit the type of across-the-board prohibition and confiscation that would be required–and massive political resistance (and not just the NRA and supine Republican politicians; I suspect a significant majority of the American public would oppose this type of solution). If this is the only solution that would work, why aren’t these sneering commentators pushing for Hillary to endorse such a solution: Repeal of the Second Amendment and confiscation of firearms. Let’s see some political courage here, particularly if your opponents aren’t the American people but only the NRA and feckless Republicans. Let’s have that fight.

But if such reforms were to pass – or the President were to attempt to act unilaterally – how exactly do you propose to actually confiscate the guns? Tell me, please, how we get there from here; chart it out for me, step by step. Americans aren’t, last I checked, Australians.

So, here we are: Republican candidates call for thoughts and prayers and get pilloried for it. Hillary calls for, let’s be frank, something so ambiguously amorphous that it amounts to absolutely nothing; or worse than nothing, since she implies that there is something that can be done (politically, legally, constitutionally) in terms of gun control that would actually reduce these types of shooting that isn’t being done. And the Republicans and their “thoughts and prayers” are uniquely useless here?

Give me a break.

Bitter Clingers and the US Media

When I’m in the car for a long period of time, I listen to NPR. Last evening, I heard what I thought must be the perfect NPR story. Here’s how it starts:

Ten years ago, Griffin Matthews was singing in a church choir when his pastor found out he was gay and kicked him out. Feeling depressed, he booked a ticket to Uganda for mission work. What happened next is the subject of Invisible Thread, a new off-Broadway musical co-written by Matthews and his life partner, Matt Gould.

Terry Gross could mine a week’s worth of Fresh Air episodes out of that material. It’s so stereotypical NPR it made me laugh, actually. Nothing against these guys in the story; it’s just that a story about a gay Christian kicked out of his church, who goes to do mission work in Uganda and gets an off-Broadway musical out of it exemplifies the quintessence of National Public Radio — an entity to which I faithfully contribute money, but to which people like me (conservative Christians) are invisible.

This morning I was in the car a lot, and heard a fair amount of NPR’s reporting on the San Bernardino shooting. On Morning Edition, the hosts and reporters seemed to be straining not to say “Islam” or “Muslim,” even though the two killers were Muslims. Steve Inskeep spoke for seven minutes — an eternity in radio news show time — with the San Bernardino-area head of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. It was a good interview for the most part, but when Inskeep finally got around to asking the CAIR man if he thought the crime had anything to do with That Religion Which Shall Not Be Mentioned, Inskeep all but apologized to him for posing a perfectly rational question in this era of global Islamist terrorism.

Don’t misread me here: I think it’s important that the don’t-blame-all-Muslims point gets made, and made strongly. But that seems to be the only Islam-as-religion angle that NPR and many in the mainstream media are interested in. Fourteen years after 9/11, the US media still appear to be more interested in keeping Americans from thinking in an informed, fair, but critical sense about Islam and violence than in helping us think more clearly about it. The On Point guest said that the overwhelming majority of American Muslims reject the kind of thing that Farouk and his wife did. I believe him. But then, the overwhelming majority of American gun owners reject it too. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to ask hard questions about gun ownership in this culture — and it is legitimate, in a time in which a small number of religiously motivated Muslims are murdering innocent people in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the US, explicitly in the name of Islam, to pose the same questions.

Later, on the way home from Baton Rouge, I caught part of public radio’s Boston-based On Point broadcast, usually hosted by the very good Tom Ashbrook, but today hosted by a female journalist whose name I didn’t catch. The host spoke at length with an Islamic scholar about San Bernardino, and the man understandably went on and on about how hard it is to be an American Muslim when things like this happen. Honestly, I don’t blame him at all; he was defending his community. Again, though, a public radio interviewer came across as someone with an agenda: not to put hard, fair questions to her guest, but to give him a platform to make unchallenged claims and assertions to the audience.

After the interview was over, I thought about whether this host, or any NPR host, or anybody in the national media, cared to interview in the same way pro-lifers and Christians in this softball way after Colorado Springs. After mass shootings, you never hear NPR and its colleagues in the national media giving softball interviews to gun rights people, who for their own reasons are feeling about like that Muslim professor and that CAIR leader feel today. And frankly, I don’t want journalists to give a free ride to pro-lifers, Christians, or gun rights supporters. That’s not journalism; that’s propaganda.

Why the double standard? Or is that only a question we bitter clingers in Jesusland ask?

A young journalist friend who works for a paper in Jesusland e-mailed this morning about the prayer-shaming New York Daily News cover I wrote about earlier today (headline: “God Is Not Fixing It”). He said that he would love to have been present for the editorial meeting in which the Daily News decided to go with that shocking cover:

Do you think there were any dissenting voices whatsoever? Maybe I wouldn’t want to hear those conversations. Maybe I would be sick that there were no dissenters. … Have things really gotten this bad — this one-sided in major newsrooms? Are the gatekeepers for our national dialogues really this far gone?

Oh, sure. Absolutely. I would be truly shocked to learn that anybody in that news meeting had the slightest qualms about that cover and headline. I say that not as a partisan, but as someone who spent over 20 years working in various mainstream newsrooms. The groupthink is overwhelming. When I was a columnist at the conservative New York Post, a senior editor shot down a column idea of mine that focused on Evangelicals in NYC, of which there are quite a few, in particular in the outer boroughs. He looked at me like I had lost my mind. “This is not a religious city,” he said. And he really believed it. As I’ve written before about that incident, I knew where that editor (who left the Post ages ago) lived, and I knew that there were Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as synagogues and mosques, in his neighborhood. But he did not see them, even though they were right in front of his face.

We are seeing once again the cost of the sham idea of diversity our media have. They don’t see us here in Jesusland, except as bitter clingers, as abstractions — and they often don’t see us even if they live and work in Jesusland, as conservative Christians who worked at and read the Dallas Morning News often said when I was there. This has been pointed out so many times over the years, and has done no apparent good, that I hardly even notice it anymore. I just quit believing the media, and assume that when reporting on issues having to do with religion and culture, that they operate in bad faith unless proven otherwise. I have very little faith in the institutions of American journalism, and am rapidly losing faith in the institutions of American academia. I think all of this is a bad thing for this country, but what can I do to stop it? I no longer believe that media and academia, for two, are not really interested in exploring the truth, but rather in enforcing a particular narrow narrative as a means of gaining and preserving power.

Hey, here’s a thought: Americans were arguably just as heavily armed decades ago, but we didn’t have mass shootings then, not like today. Then again, explicit, gory violence in the entertainment media, including in video games, was not remotely as prevalent as it is today. Journalists get awfully defensive when anybody starts talking about reining in liberty under the First Amendment (unless, of course, they’re talking about restricting the speech rights of pro-lifers) — this, even though ISIS routinely broadcasts on the web video of extremely gory violent acts, as a kind of religious and ideological pornography, to inspire recruits. As a writer and journalist myself, I’m defensive about the First Amendment, but I agree that the right to free speech and religion cannot be absolute, and that it’s worth thinking critically about how we exercise those rights. Seems to me that many people in our media have no qualms about wanting to restrict, or even repeal, the Second Amendment, and restricting the First Amendment as long as the people they don’t know or like are the only ones affected.

You know who I don’t see in the media? People like the receptionist at the big church in Baton Rouge I visited this morning. I went by to see one of the pastors, and because of the news, noticed for the first time the bulletproof glass on the front door and windows, and the security cameras. I said to the receptionist, “Isn’t it crazy that we live in a time when a church feels it necessary to take these kinds of precautions?”

She agreed, but said that they once had to go on lockdown at the church when police warned them that an armed man was in the area. The man had assaulted a pastor the day before. Police were looking for him, and were concerned that he might be headed to that particular church.

“I’m sitting right here on the front lines,” said the receptionist. “We take all the precautions we can, but you can never be completely safe. I pray every day, and pray over my three children every day, for the Lord’s protection. We can’t live in fear all the time. We just have to give it up to God.”

That’s what prayer means to most of us in Jesusland. It’s not a substitute for action in the real world, but rather a recognition that it is impossible to stop radical evil at all times and in all places, and that we must develop the spiritual resources to bear that suffering. I know that that woman is operating from faith, a faith that drives both action and contemplation. The secular liberals in the Democratic Party and in the national media are operating from a different kind of faith: a faith in the power of law and reason to prevent evil.

I know which side I’m on. But then, I’m on the other side of the chasm, too far away for people like the folks in the national Democratic Party, at NPR, the Daily News, and others to see, except as an abstract threat.

 

Prayer Shaming: The View From Jesusland

Here is the full image of the New York Daily News wood for Thursday:

As I write this on Wednesday night, the public has just been told the identity of one the shooters: Syed Farook. We do not know any of the others, nor their motive, if it is known. But the New York Daily News, in its journalistic wisdom, has found a way to blame conservative Christians for this massacre. This, because the Republican politicians featured on the newspaper’s cover responded to the initial news of events in San Bernardino by offering prayers instead of calling for legislation.

We have learned a new term in these past 24 hours: prayer shaming. Emma Green might well have coined the term in her good piece for The Atlantic‘s website on the phenomenon. She collected examples of it that appeared in the liberal media, and on people’s Twitter feeds. Excerpts from her report:

There’s a clear claim being made here, and one with an edge: Democrats care about doing something and taking action while Republicans waste time offering meaningless prayers. These two reactions, policy-making and praying, are portrayed as mutually exclusive, coming from totally contrasting worldviews. Elsewhere on Twitter, full-on prayer shaming set in: Anger about the shooting was turned not toward the perpetrator or perpetrators, whose identities are still unknown, but at those who offered their prayers.

More:

This cynicism offers a view into just how much religion and politics have changed in the United States. Prayer and political action have a deeply entwined history in America. From civil rights to women’s suffrage, nearly every social-justice movement has had strong supporters from religious communities—U.S. history is littered with images like the one of pastors and rabbis marching on Selma, side by side with political activists.

As Green observes, the prayer-shamers make the unwarranted assumption that all religious believers are gun-rights supporters. Worse, they reveal a total lack of understanding of what religious people believe, and why. Politicians and others offered their prayers as the scene was still active. To religious believers, prayers are not “meaningless platitudes,” but appeals to the Creator of the universe to help the suffering, as well as an expression of empathy and solidarity with those who suffer. When my late sister was suffering from cancer, a Muslim man in Turkey who read about her on this blog e-mailed me to say he was begging Allah to heal her. That moved me greatly, because though I am not a Muslim, but a Christian, I knew that this stranger of a different faith was offering to my sister the greatest thing he could.

She still died. But I treasure the memory of that Turkish man’s prayers, and the prayers so many others offered us. We do not know the will of God, but we know that we are to pray without ceasing. Contemplation is not something we do instead of action; rather, we ground action in contemplation. Ora et labora; prayer and work.

“People shot. In the office waiting for cops. Pray for us.” That’s the text message one man got from his daughter, hiding in the building under attack. She asked her father for prayers. Should she be ashamed, Daily News?

A couple of weeks ago, Roland Dodds, a secular liberal, wrote a good essay saying that the Left needs Christianity. Excerpts:

Yet even I can recognize the positive role a religious leader can have in pushing their flock towards left-wing aims. The Pope’s comments about inequality and capitalism have been much more impactful than a lefty economist’s might have been simply because his comments resonate with Christian morals and principles. The Pope’s comments force free market minded Christians to address the divide between their political and theological positions, and possibly move some of the flock in left-leaning directions.

I don’t subscribe to the religious teachings of the church, but I see something positive in the church as a communal institution. When I attend mass, the arguments delivered from the pulpit fall on deaf ears, but the serenity of the room captivates me. It is a sad reflection that the halls of the cathedral are one of the few places that haven’t been encroached upon by consumer culture. Nearly every other public and private space has been subjugated by consumerism. We are continually asked to contemplate a future purchase, or measure our current standing by the financial state of conjectural others via advertisements and marketing. I see these encroachments as a subtle yet subversive bending of the public psyche.

More:

I hold a controversial position on the subject of common narratives that libertarians and liberals may find problematic. I believe that the tragedy of our contemporary society is the death of any meaningful meta-narratives that bind a community or people. Not only has Christianity faded in its communal importance, but in terms of political power, ideologies like socialism are ghosts of their former selves. What makes us a community or nation other than our proximity? What responsibility do I have to my neighbor if larger social ideals do not bind us together?

As much as I wish an alternative were present, Christianity in the West is likely the best bet at helping build a larger meta-narrative around labor and pay. We are seeing the result of the death of any unifying communal theory in our society today, with individualism and consumerism marching in tandem through civilization. With the death of socialism as a viable, revolutionary alternative to the state of the world, the Left must embrace Christianity. The Left without a unifying theory of justice that can extend beyond its existing adherents is one lost on a post-modern sea without the language to unite its crew.

That essay was written only two weeks ago, but tonight it feels like it came from another era, and even another country.

Do not underestimate the meaning of this cultural moment. We have reached the point in our culture in which leading voices on the Left feel compelled to shout from the rooftops condemnation on Christians for offering something as ordinary and decent as prayers for atrocity victims as a first response to news of the killings. Think about that for a moment. When the simple offering of prayers for the dead and wounded are grounds for spiteful attack, it is hard to avoid wondering just what commonalities bind us as Americans anymore. The hatred that so many liberal political, media, and academic elites, and now many ordinary liberals, have for traditional Christians — finding a way to blame us for the alleged crimes of one Syed Farook and his cohorts, as well as a paranoid gun-toting lunatic named Robert Lewis Dear — has gone to a place I’m not sure we can recover from.

I’m more liberal than many of my fellow conservatives on some political issues precisely because I am a Christian, and believe that my faith requires it of me. And I’m more liberal on gun control than many of my fellow conservatives, not because I’m a Christian, but because I cannot understand why it is a wise thing to allow civilians to own military-grade weaponry. However, I grew up in a hunting culture, in which guns were a normal part of life, and though I’m not a hunter anymore, I own guns, and feel quite comfortable knowing that many people in my part of the world own guns. Gun violence around here is very rare. It’s a different story among poor black communities in north Baton Rouge and in New Orleans, but there are a lot of poor black people out here in the country, only 30 miles away from north Baton Rouge, and there’s little to no gun violence.

Something else is going on here. The culture of violence in the United States is not simply a matter of the availability of guns. You cannot “truly end [the] gun scourge” unless you scrap the Second Amendment and disarm the entire nation. Not going to happen. Even though California’s gun control laws are the strictest in the country, those laws didn’t prevent this week’s slaughter. A liberal writer named S.E. Smith says that this just goes to show that we must have even stricter laws. Excerpt:

Citizens of most of the West and a fair chunk of the Global South are shocked by how insufficient our gun laws are, and they should be. What private individual needs to own a long gun? A handgun kept anywhere other than a range for recreational shooting? [Emphasis mine — RD] Military-grade equipment? We aren’t living in an era in which we need a “well-regulated militia.” In fact, the organizations calling themselves “militias” today tend to land on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of known hate groups on a regular basis. These are precisely the people we don’twant carrying guns. Many of them are terrorists disrupting American society and inculcating us with a sense of deep fear of going about our daily business.

We can blame the gun lobby for all of this, and we should keep blaming the gun lobby until Congress cannot avoid this problem any longer. Even though we keep saying this after every mass shooting, it is apparently not enough. We must march on Congress, we must lean on our representatives, and we must vote for candidates who promise to take aggressive stances on gun control. We owe it to our dead, if not to ourselves.

This is the kind of thing that makes me grudgingly respect the NRA. Why? Because S.E. Smith and those like her cannot imagine why anybody should have the right to own a gun. No hunters. No sport shooters. No law-abiding civilians who want to own a gun for protection against criminals, or wild animals like the poisonous snakes that are common in my part of the world. It’s all the gun lobby’s fault, all of it, according to S.E. Smith, who lives in northern California and writes about things like transmisogyny, and how paying for surgery to chop her “hated boobs” off is her own “American dream.” S.E. Smith and I live on the same planet, but in different worlds — and to be honest, I kind of doubt that we live in the same country.

Whatever. This is not a post about gun control, about which I believe honorable people can disagree (though let it be said that not everyone who disagrees, on both sides of the issue, does so honorably). This is a post about liberals — ordinary liberals, not fringe folk like boob-choppers — who hate conservative Christians so much that they react to a mass shooting by denouncing those Christians for praying for the dead, calling their prayers “meaningless platitudes” (unlike #SendOurGirlsHome, I guess).

This is ultimately a post about alienation. And exhaustion.

I’m sick of mass shootings too. Last year, at a party, I met one of the victims of the Colorado movie theater mass shooting. She was on crutches, and told me how the bullet shattered her knee. And I’m tired of poor and working people not having health care. It affects people dear to me, and yes, given that outgoing Gov. Bobby Jindal turned down Medicaid expansion money, thinking of how much my friends are suffering affected my vote for Louisiana governor this year. I don’t know any liberals who are more disgusted by Donald Trump’s campaign than I am, and most of the conservatives I’m close to feel the same way (even as we have no love for the GOP regulars). I left the Republican Party officially several years ago, and registered as an Independent. Point is, I vote my principles, not the party line.

But here’s the thing. I remember what progressive militants did to Brendan Eich. I remember when that same band savaged that small-town pizza parlor in Indiana earlier this year. We have same-sex marriage by order of the US Supreme Court, and now the US Government is going after public high schools, demanding that they allow young men who think they are young women to change in girls’ locker rooms, and vice versa. We have seen our universities kick people like us off campuses for being insufficiently diverse, (remember what happened to Tish Harrison Warren and InterVarsity at Vanderbilt?), and this fall have watched as university administrators have yielded to bizarrely illiberal demands from militant protesters. These protests haven’t targeted traditional Christians yet, but can anybody doubt what would happen if the campus left decided to do that, in the name of their sham “diversity”?

Look. Traditional Christians and other social conservatives know what’s coming. We know we may not be able to stop it, but we also know that we had better fight back, while we can — and that resistance is not only through voting. Yeah, yeah, I’ve been saying this for some time now, in all my Benedict Option blogging, but seeing how eager so many liberals have been to pin Colorado Springs and now San Bernardino on Christians, despite having no evidence whatsoever to justify their scapegoating — well, it feels like this is not just another one of those things, but something much, much bigger.

As I was writing this post, a friend who is a smart observer of cultural politics sent an e-mail with the subject line “Prayer shaming.” The text of the e-mail said:

This is a very big cultural moment. Total exposure of the fault line.

Yes. This is true. I’m not even emotional about it, not anymore. In fact, there’s a kind of serenity in accepting that this social compact is probably irretrievably broken. It is always better to live in truth. This feels like the moment when Tish Harrison Warren — who, as it happens, will be staying with us tonight — realized how much the Vanderbilt administration hated Christians like her — moderate Evangelicals who held the same beliefs about same-sex marriage that Barack Obama professed publicly at the time (2011):

For me, it was revolutionary, a reorientation of my place in the university and in culture.

I began to realize that inside the church, the territory between Augustine of Hippo and Jerry Falwell seems vast, and miles lie between Ron Sider and Pat Robertson. But in the eyes of the university (and much of the press), subscribers to broad Christian orthodoxy occupy the same square foot of cultural space.

The line between good and evil was drawn by two issues: creedal belief and sexual expression. If religious groups required set truths or limited sexual autonomy, they were bad—not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus.

It didn’t matter to them if we were politically or racially diverse, if we cared about the environment or built Habitat homes. It didn’t matter if our students were top in their fields and some of the kindest, most thoughtful, most compassionate leaders on campus. There was a line in the sand, and we fell on the wrong side of it.

The line in the sand, the fault line, has become an unbridgeable chasm — and people like me are on the wrong side of it. Don’t feel sorry for yourself, Christians. This is good information. This is a useful thing to get learned. So learn it. And pray, and think, and act. It’s important.

Since I began writing this post, more has been made public about shooting suspect Syed Farook, whose father described him as a devout Muslim:

Longtime neighbors in Riverside were shocked to hear Farook could be involved with such a brutal attack.

“He was quiet but always polite,” Maria Gutierrez told The News. “Maybe two years ago he became more religious. He grew a beard and started to wear religious clothing. The long shirt that’s like a dress and the cap on his head.”

“I know he was very smart. He went to college early. He and his brother were always working in the garage on cars. Until like 11 p.m. at night. I think his mom was a nurse and his older brother was in the military.”

“If it’s him, I’m very surprised. Can you imagine? They were my neighbors for so many years. I never would guess.”

And this just in: Police identify the other dead suspect as Tashfeen Malik.

Somehow, this is going to be the fault of Christians too. We will be told not to blame all Muslims for this — and that’s fair, and necessary — but remember that we were just told the other day by our liberal media betters to blame all pro-life Christians for the paranoid crackpot who shot up the Planned Parenthood.

American conservatives are about to accept the Jesusland proposition.

— Aaron Gigliotti (@GigliottiAaron) December 3, 2015

Come on down, brother. Leave L.A., move to La. We got guns, Jesus, boats, boudin, everything you need.

San Bernardino Spite

San Bernadino shooting happened less than two miles from a Planned Parenthood health clinic https://t.co/eNzSBzW6d7pic.twitter.com/B9vJ5zkhHj

— Bloomberg Business (@business) December 2, 2015

I have nothing to say at this time about the San Bernardino shootings, until we know who did it, and why they may have done it. Thanks to the police there, we will probably have that information soon. What I do want to say is how repulsive I find all the people on Twitter, Facebook, and yes, in the media (see above), who have shown themselves all afternoon eager to cram this atrocity into a preferred political narrative. The certainty that there will be millions of people disappointed when the identity of the killers and their motives are revealed makes me despair of what we have become in this country.

For the record, Bloomberg Business, the shooting happened four miles away from a mosque. It happened 1.2 miles away from a megachurch. So what? Jerks.

UPDATE: I agree with Russell Moore:

Front Page of Tomorrow’s NY Daily News pic.twitter.com/2xFdtV0SSq

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 3, 2015

Resistance to Grace

I was e-mailing with a friend this week, talking about the final scene in the novel Laurus (see my interview today with its author here). My friend wrote:

The final lines brought home to me that one of his purposes in the book was to show how people can be in the presence of such miracles and remain numb to them in any but the most self-serving ways. It’s a theme he touches on several times.

It’s something that has always perplexed me, actually–how people can see miracles and blessings and enjoy them, then just shrug off the implications, fail to form any relationship with God, fail to amend their lives. I see people do that, but don’t understand it.

It happened to my late father. Back in 1994, my father witnessed the reality of life after death, and the power of forgiveness, and of the Church’s spiritual power, to resolve this brokenness — a story I recount in How Dante Can Save Your Life. And yet he remained unmoved personally. He believed everything that happened, that he, in fact, was at the center of, was real. And yet, because the implications of those things being real meant that he had to change his life in ways he found challenging, he chose to live with the cognitive dissonance. I don’t get it. Evgeny Vodolazkin does, though.

Many people find comfort in telling themselves that they would believe in God if only they would have an experience of the numinous. But this is not true, or at least is true far less often than you might suspect. If the heart is unwilling to believe — or, to be more precise, is unwilling to follow through with the implications of that belief, as in my dad’s case — then miracle is useless. My correspondent sent me the following passage from the second part of the autobiography of the great English art historian Sir Kenneth Clark:

I lived in solitude, surrounded by books on the history of religion, which have always been my favorite reading. This may help to account for curious episode that took place on one of my stays in the villino. I had a religious experience. It took place in the church of San Lorenzo, but did not seem to be connected with the harmonious beauty of the architecture. I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was irradiated by kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before. This state of mind lasted for several months, and, wonderful though it was, it posed an awkward problem in terms of action. My life was far from blameless: I would have to reform. My family would think I was going mad, and perhaps after all, it was a delusion, for I was in every way unworthy of receiving such a flood of grace. Gradually the effect wore off, and I made no effort to retain it. I think I was right; I was too deeply embedded in the world to change course. But that I had “felt the finger of God” I’m quite sure, and, although the memory of this experience has faded, it still helps me to understand the joys of the saints.

“I would have to reform,” he conceded, but finding that too difficult, he chose to turn his back on the treasure of this extraordinary grace. I find this so hard to understand. It happens to the protagonist of Houellebecq’s Submission: he is given an experience of the divine, but dismisses it to return to his miserable ordinary life.

‘People Need Other Things To Live By’

Earlier this fall, I ran across a short review by Ken Kalfus in The New Yorker, praising a best-selling Russian novel called Laurus that had just been translated into English. Kalfus wrote:

A new novel by the Russian medievalist Eugene Vodolazkin, “Laurus,” recreates this fervent landscape [of medieval Russia] and suggests why the era, its holy men, and the forests and fields of Muscovy retain such a grip on the Russian imagination. Vodolazkin’s hero-mystic Arseny is a protagonist extrapolated from the little that is known about the lives and deeds of the famous holy men. Born in 1440, he’s raised by his herbalist grandfather Christofer near the grounds of the Kirillov Monastery, about three hundred miles north of Moscow. He becomes a renowned medicine man, faith healer, and prophet who “pelted demons with stones and conversed with angels.” He makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He takes on new names, depending on how he will next serve God. The people venerate his humble spirituality. In “Laurus,” Vodolazkin aims directly at the heart of the Russian religious experience and perhaps even at that maddeningly elusive concept that is cherished to the point of cliché: the Russian soul.

Of course I had to order this novel at once. I devoured it, and even now, a month after finishing Laurus — the title is one of the names the novel’s protagonist takes —  it is an almost constant presence in my imagination. I tell nearly everybody I see that they have to read this amazing book. My friend Eric Metaxas took my advice, and was dazzled by it — and is going to interview Evgeny Vodolazkin (“Eugene” is the Anglicized form of his name) on his radio show next week when Vodolazkin comes to New York for Russian Literature Week 2015. Back in October, I blogged about “the wonder-working Laurus,” and said, in part:

What kind of novel makes you want to enter into contemplative prayer after reading from its pages? I’ve never heard of one. But Laurus is that kind of novel. It induces an awareness of the radical enchantment of the world, and of the grandeur of the soul’s journey through this life toward God. It is so strange and mystical and … well, to call a novel “holy” is too much, but Laurus conjures on every page an awareness of holiness that is without precedence in my experience as a reader. Holiness illuminates this novel like an icon lamp.

By saying that, I fear that I will make the novel sound pious and devotional. It very much is not. This is an earthy novel, filled with the sounds, smells, violence, superstition, and fanaticism of the Middle Ages. The achievement of Vodolazkin, who is a medieval historian by vocation, is to make this faraway world come vividly to life, and to saturate it with mystical Orthodox Christianity, such that even the leaves of the trees are enchanted. Most Americans who read Laurus will take it as a work with a strong current of magical realism; the handful of us American readers who worship in the Eastern Christian tradition will recognize it as simply Orthodoxy, where the border between wonder-working and everyday life is porous.

As it turns out, Evgeny Vodolazkin and I were able to connect by telephone from his home in St. Petersburg in early November, and spent nearly two hours in conversation. It was like talking to an old friend. Vodolazkin, 51, is a philologist who works on medieval manuscripts at the Institute of Russian Literature — commonly known as Pushkin House — in St. Petersburg. We must have chatted for 20 minutes or so before we got down to business. We must have been talking about geopolitics — not a surprising topic for a Russian and an American these days — when I began taking notes. What follows is a transcript of our talk, lightly edited for clarity:

RD : Do you believe that problems of the modern world can be solved by political means?

EV : I don’t do politics. If a journalist asks me for my political views, I answer normally that I have no political views. As a Christian, I deal with each event separately, and I try to judge it from a Christian point of view, of right and wrong. I have a theory – well, “theory” sounds too serious, but I have an idea. Each phenomenon has different dimensions or, better, levels and political level is not the highest one . I am certain that the reasons of social events lie in the human soul. It is a concrete soul, where grows aggression, and this aggression echoes with the aggression in other souls. Good sides of the soul do not communicate as easily with other souls as the dark sides. This aggression grows with a terrible speed. Then this aggression takes on social form – of revolution, war, and so on. I suppose nobody believes that Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s death in Sarajevo is the reason for the First World War. Everything was ready for the explosion; the assassination was the spark. Or, consider the Russian Revolution, in 1917. Normally, history books tell us that it was a very difficult situation in Russia – there was hunger, starvation, and so forth. But we had much more difficult situations than that [before] in Russia, and did not have a revolution.

The reason of these events is the united energy of individuals.  As Christians and as writers, the main place where we both can work is a man’s soul. We have to work with individual human beings, and their souls. This is why I told you that my position is one of Christian personalism. The main thing we can do to fight this evil is to pray, and maybe also to write something that will douse this fire. To do something politically is not so effective. Politics is a result of the situation we have in our souls. It has to do with consequences, not with reasons.

 RD: A Catholic professor told me that the best response to our own disordered moment in the West is to meditate on what Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, did when the Nazis occupied Poland. He started a theater company. The point is that the most effective response to this kind of thing is cultural. Do you agree?

EV: Yes, culture is our response, really. Except for the gathering of the Holy Spirit, culture is the second most important work that we can do.

My teacher, [historian Dmitri Sergeyevich] Likhachov, a famous Russian scholar, wrote that the main thing that justifies the existence of a nation is its culture. As to Russian culture, literature plays a very important role in it. I can’t say that Russian literature is better or worse than other great literatures, but certainly it has a special weight: it is a rather metaphysical literature.

The reason for this is in its origins. Compared to literature in the Western medieval time, Russians had almost no secular literature. The first literature available to the Russians in the first centuries of Russian Christianity, ninety percent of it was foreign, in translation. And translation was something restricted to the Church. Georgy Fedotov, in his excellent book The Russian Religious Mind, describes the cultural consequences of [Russia’s] baptism. First, the Russians received the Holy Bible in their native language, which was a positive thing. On the other hand, they were cut off from the ancient literature of the Greeks and Romans. At the same time, the people in Western Europe had access to classical literature. So, this may account for the particularity of Russian literature, its strong ethical tension which finds its echo in the great literature of Russia in the 19th and 20th century.

 RD: In the West, the term “medieval” is usually used as an insult, to denote something savage or backwards. Yet we also look back to the Middle Ages as a time of beauty and even romance. How is the Middle Ages seen in Russia?

EV: With us, the word “medieval” is also a swear word, meaning something obscure and wild. In truth, the Middle Ages were more humanistic than modernity. I say such a paradoxical thing as someone who has worked with this literature for more than 30 years. The massacres we have seen in the 20th century, no one in the Middle Ages could have imagined. Despite what you might have heard, a human life was estimated very highly in the Middle Ages. When they say that humanism appeared only in modernity, it is not true. It was a special kind of humanism — the humanism of modernity — that saw the human being as the measure of all things, but medievals were convinced that this measure was given by God. It’s a very essential difference. Everything modern humanism says about the dignity of man can also be said by humanism’s medieval version, but if in modernity the human being is at the top of the hierarchy, in the Middle Ages, the top of the hierarchy is God.

 RD: Why did you choose to write a novel of the Middle Ages?

EV: My interest in the medieval period began when I studied Nikolai Leskov, a Russian writer of second half of the 19th century. Some of his writings are close to the Middle Ages. Thanks to Leskov, I discovered for myself this amazing period. I was born and raised in the Soviet time, and for me, [studying the Middle Ages] was also a sort of escapism, a kind of immigration. It was the only piece of reality where the Soviet mentality was absent. It was very important in the 1980s.

As to my way to Laurus, I would never have spoken 10 or 15 years ago about the Middle Ages in a non-scientific milieu. I mean that from a scientific point of view, to become a writer is not comme il faut [i.e., what one does]. From this point of view, being a scholar is the best thing in the world, and you have to be dedicated to your work. If you write fiction, it is strange. Besides, I was sure that I would not write about the Middle Ages because I used to deal with Middle Ages every day from morning to evening. I supposed that for me, for my creative writing, I would choose something else. I thought it was rather dull first to study Old Russia, and then to write fiction about it.

In the Nineties, reality in Russia, and in Russian literature, was filled with a blackness that exhausted me. A few years ago, it occurred to me to write about something good. I tried to go against the mainstream. To tell the truth, I was afraid to write about my contemporary life – it is not so easy to depict contemporaries. What’s more, in literature, it is a very difficult thing to depict protagonists who are good. There is no problem writing about “bad ” people, but to create positive literary figures is rather difficult. So, I concluded that the only material I could use would come from the Middle Ages, because if I would write about life based on modern, contemporary material, I thought it would sound false. So that’s how I arrived at setting my novel in the Middle Ages.

 RD: Did the fact that you are a believing Orthodox Christian have something to do with your creative choice?

EV: Yes, the religious dimension was very important. The important feature of the Middle Ages in the life of the people, was God. And now, in our post-Christian society, God very often is not present in our life.

My parents were agnostics – I say “were,” because I believe that something in the last years has changed [Note: Vodolazkin’s father died suddenly shortly after this interview was completed — RD]. I was not baptized as a child; it was a period of my personal paganism. As a child, I asked someone, some unknown person, to help me, please. When I was 16, I was baptized; a movement inside me led me to that point. Where did it come from? When I was 14 or 15, I discovered death. Of course, I knew about death from the very beginning. I had seen dead people at funerals. Little children, they know that death exists, but they don’t believe it concerns them. They think that a death is a personal misunderstanding, or something that happens to this particular person who died.

But when people are moving from childhood to their teenage years, they discover death. It is an old story – it is the story of Adam. Actually, Adam discovered death after his sin. This is the same thing we experience with changes in the organism – one discovers the sexual side of life and at the same time, death. It was a terrible fear – not that I will die and will not be, but rather that everything is pointless without God. That was a great shock for me.

In the Soviet Union, it was prohibited for young people to visit church, it was a huge risk to be punished (for example to be thrown out of the university) , but I did it anyway. It was my secret life. I visited church, but nobody talked about it. I felt like the first Christian.

RD: In the West, we call the “Middle Ages” the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in the fifth century, to the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century. What does it mean when you describe the period in which Laurus is set as medieval? I mean, without a beginning in the classical world and an end with the birth of modernity, as Europe had, where is the “middle”?

EV: It’s true that Russian Middle Ages are not a middle but in some ways really the beginning. Christianity became an ethnogenetic factor for us. That is, Christianity was the ground on which the Russian nation was founded. There were no Russians in the 10th century. There were many different Slavic tribes, Finnish, and so on. Christianity [which came to Russian lands in the year 988], brought culture with it. This culture made from separate tribes a Russian nation. So our Middle Ages differ from the Western Middle Ages, but generally, they are the same. Very often they used the same texts, they had the same ideals. They differ from each other only in style of life.

But we Russian medievalists, we use sometimes the Western European terminology to reflect our common features and our common roots with the West. This terminology helps us to express the unity of old European culture. It was one bird with two different wings.

RD: Is this why you included in Laurus the character Ambrogio, the Catholic who befriends Arseny, and goes with him on pilgrimage to Jerusalem?

EV: Yes! It is an expression of affection for my Western brothers and sisters. It doesn’t mean that I think that tomorrow we will be reunited. I’m sure that if God sees that we need each other, He will open the door for that. Ambrogio, he is an expression of my love also of Italy. I love Italy very much.

RD: Back to the Middle Ages. One of the things that really stands out about Laurus is that it takes place in a culture of metaphysical realism, and you really make the modern readers, who have lost this perspective, understand what it means. As in the Western medieval period, people in medieval Russia believed that God was, as we say in our Orthodox prayer, everywhere present and filled all things. And then, as you know, in the West the doctrine of nominalism became dominant, and that ended up disenchanting the world. Can you speak of the metaphysical aspect of your novel?

EV: Realists and nominalists, we had no dispute like that in Russia. Nominalism

was not very popular in Russia, though I would not speak about Russian theology as a unified entity. The realist ideas were very important for Russian culture. Take, for example, the Bible story of Joseph, the son of Jacob. A medieval author asked, why didn’t God say to Jacob that Joseph was not dead, as Jacob thought, but is alive. The answer is that Joseph was a prefiguration of Christ , and otherwise he couldn’t play his metaphysical role. The medievals interpreted everything as pointing to divine realities.

As to my novel, you know, some critics declared Laurus a postmodern novel. This is a mistake, because postmodernism is something that is rather far from me. It plays with quoting literature of the past, but it has no grounding in something real. Postmodern texts don’t also exist within a metaphysical reality , they have no eidos [essence], to speak in Plato’s terms. All the “postmodern” things about my novel have their roots in the Middle Ages, but these roots are seldom recognized.

RD: I am very taken by a 1923 book written by Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, called in English The End of Our Time. In it, he says that the modern age is exhausted, and he calls for a “new middle age,” a time of spiritual rebirth. He says it is coming, because we cannot kill the spirit, and Truth.

EV: I like this work of Berdyaev very much. I’m not a theologian, but a philologist, and I see that we have signs of a New Middle Ages now in literature. It is not a Middle Ages in the literal sense, rather a synthesis of modernity and the Middle Ages, and more of the Middle Ages is present. You know, it is like a child is very often is more similar to his grandfather and grandmother than his parents. The new literature now being born, it has many, many features of the Middle Ages in its structure. It is a great theme, maybe it sounds rather paradoxical, but I suppose that modernity as a cultural epoch is over.

RD: Do you think it is possible to be medieval in our world?

EV: I’m not sure that it is possible in the strictly medieval sense : the Middle Ages are also over. Of course if I say that modernity is over, it is a sort of exaggeration. But what I would like to stress is this: Berdyaev says people in the Middle Ages were not so individualistic as people in modernity, but they were stronger as persons — much stronger, because as a background, they had very strong and common ideas. Modernity developed individuality. We have discovered the individuality in us, in our culture; it was the main purpose of modernity, and it was very important. But now, we are entering a time that will bring us another set of values that are more important than individuality.

RD: I think one of the most important moments in Laurus occurs when an elder tells Arseny, who is on pilgrimage, to consider the meaning of his travels. The elder advises: “I am not saying wandering is useless: there is a point to it. Do not become like your beloved Alexander [the Great], who had a journey but no goal. And do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.” What does this say to the modern reader?

That it is time to think about the destination, and not about the journey. If the way leads nowhere, it is meaningless. During the perestroika period, we had a great film, Repentance, by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze . It’s a movie about the destruction wrought by the Soviet past. The last scene of the film shows a woman baking a cake at the window. An old woman passing on the street stops and asks if this way leads to the church. The woman in the house says no, this road does not lead to the church. And the old woman replies, “What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a church?”

So a road as such is nothing. It is really the endless way of Alexander the Great, whose great conquests were aimless. I thought about mankind as a little curious beetle that I once saw on the big road from Berlin to Munich. This beetle was marching along the highway, and it seemed to him that he knows everything about this way. But if he would ask the main questions, “Where does this road begin, and where does it go?”, he can’t answer. He knew neither what is Berlin, nor Munich. This is how we are today.

Technical and scientific revelation brought us the belief that all questions are possible to solve, but that is a great illusion. Technology has not solved the problem of death, and it will never solve this problem . The revelation that mankind saw conjured the illusion that everything is clear and known to us. Medieval people, 100 percent of them believed in God – were they really so stupid in comparison to us? Was the difference between their knowledge and our knowledge as different as we think? It was not so! I’m sure that in a certain sense, our knowledge will be a kind of mythology for future generations. I reflected this mythology with humor in Laurus, but this humor was not against medieval people. Maybe it was self-irony.

RD: Timelessness is one of the main ideas of Laurus, which leaps suddenly and unexpectedly from the medieval present, to our own time. What does this mean?

EV: Time doesn’t exist. Of course time exists if we’re speaking in everyday terms, but if we think from the perspective of eternity, time doesn’t exist, because it has its end point. For medieval people, God was the most important thing about life, and the second most important thing was Time. On the one hand, medieval people lived rather short lives, but on the other hand, life was very, very long, because they lived with their minds in eternity. Every day is an eternity in the church, and all that surrounded these people. Eternity made time very long, and very interesting.

If you would think about the first patriarchs, Adam, Methuselah, and others, they had an incredible long life. Adam lived 930 years, Methuselah lived, as far as I remember, 962 years. Because they had eternity in their memories, eternity could not disappear at once. This eternity disappeared slowly, dissipated in the long life of the patriarchs. Medieval people, by comparison to us, are these patriarchs. Their life was very long because they had as part of daily life this vertical connection, the connection to the divine realm, a connection that most of us in modernity have lost.

RD: Another great theme of your novel is suffering. Arseny suffers immensely in his life, but he receives his suffering as something sent by God, and redeems it. This seems to me to be one of the most difficult things for us moderns to understand. We have forgotten how to suffer.

EV: It is a very difficult question. Nobody wants to suffer. It is natural. But suffering sometimes comes to some people as an experience that causes them to think about their own lives. For Arseny, suffering is actually the way of his life, because he suffered from the very beginning — the most terrible suffering for him was the death of [his common-law wife] Ustina. That was the highest point in his suffering.

Then I would say that he loved to suffer as many saints loved to suffer. I can’t say that it is the only way or the proper way to live. No. I understand very good people who don’t want to suffer. But I remember Tolstoy, as his beloved son Vanya died, he said, “I thank God for this suffering.” So, some people understand this, some don’t – there are different ways of life, but suffering must not be something you choose to inflict on yourself. If somebody deliberately cuts his fingers, that is not the kind of suffering that brings redemption.

Laurus’s suffering is not suffering for its own sake, but for a way to help others that he’s trying to heal. That is one kind of suffering, but it exists a closely related kind of suffering, a very dangerous one: suffering as a sort of pleasure. For the saints, it was not an easy thing to divide both features of suffering.

RD: This story of a healer, holy man, and wanderer of the Middle Ages has been translated into over twenty languages, and was a critical and commercial success in Russia. Does this surprise you?

EV: As I finished writing Laurus , I told my wife I worked three years on this novel, and now you will read it, and so will my colleagues — but nobody else. It was so far from the mainstream. But it became so popular in Russia, and it received a big literary prize, one that was given previously only to mainstream books. This mistake was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It taught me that despite all the garbage I see in our bookstores or on TV, despite all of this, people need other things to live by. It is an illusion that they need this shit! If somebody has enough courage to speak with another voice, people will read it. The shock was that I asked myself the question: Is Laurus now mainstream?

Liberals and conservatives both liked my book. I tried to say with it that there is another way to live: the way of the saints. It is not an easy way to walk, but maybe we can walk alongside it. I’m not trying to teach people in this book, only to show them what this other way looks like. You know, maybe it was easier in the first ages of Christianity than it is now in our post-Christian culture. Nobody knew about Christianity back then. These people, these first Christians, brought the fire of a new faith, of a new religion. Now everybody knows everything, and gets very angry if somebody tries to explain something to them. In modern times, I think we need a new language to talk about such things.

If you’re in New York next week, you’ll have two chances to see and hear Evgeny Vodolazkin talk about Laurus and his work in Old Russian. Here is the full schedule for Russian Literature Week. Vodolazkin speaks at NYU on Monday December 7, from 4 to 5:30pm. He will appear on Tuesday December 8 from 7 to 9 pm with Laurus translator Lisa Hayden at BookCourt, the excellent bookstore on Court Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

The book is called Laurus, and it is a masterpiece.