Recent Reads

Early Christian Anti-Judaism

Short book review: Rabbit in the Road by Oliver Campbell and Danika D. Potts

I'm not one who reads much fiction, especially pop fiction, but I was surprisingly very engaged by this book. The plot and the character development were both excellent. And the end, like much less in the book, was definitely a shocker. This is a great achievement for two authors who have not written a book before. I hope that they have a great deal of success in the future. They certainly deserve it!

Women's emancipation and monastic angels

This passage stands out to me as particularly interesting, especially in regards to two topics which I have touched on here in the past: 1. the "making equal" of women that was accomplished in early Christianity and which led disproportionately largely numbers of women to convert to the new faith and 2. the development of monasticism and its place as an official institution in the Church as well as the view of monastics as living the "angelic" life.

Hold fast, O virgins! hold fast what you have begun to be; hold fast what you shall be. A great reward awaits you, a great recompense of virtue, the immense advantage of chastity. Do you wish to know what ill the virtue of continence avoids, what good it possesses? “I will multiply,” says God to the woman, “thy sorrows and thy groanings; and in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” You are free from this sentence. You do not fear the sorrows and the groans of women. You have no fear of child-bearing; nor is your husband lord over you; but your Lord and Head is Christ, after the likeness and in the place of the man; with that of men your lot and your condition is equal. It is the word of the Lord which says, “The children of this world beget and are begotten; but they who are counted worthy of that world, and of the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage: neither shall they die any more: for they are equal to the angels of God, being the children of the resurrection.” That which we shall be, you have already begun to be. You possess already in this world the glory of the resurrection. You pass through the world without the contagion of the world; in that you continue chaste and virgins, you are equal to the angels of God. Only let your virginity remain and endure substantial and uninjured; and as it began bravely, let it persevere continuously, and not seek the ornaments of necklaces nor garments, but of conduct. Let it look towards God and heaven, and not lower to the lust of the flesh and of the world, the eyes uplifted to things above, or set them upon earthly things.

St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Dress of Virgins, 22

St. Cyprian to the rich

You say that you are wealthy and rich, and you think that you should use those things which God has willed you to possess. Use them, certainly, but for the things of salvation; use them, but for good purposes; use them, but for those things which God has commanded, and which the Lord has set forth. Let the poor feel that you are wealthy; let the needy feel that you are rich.  Lend your estate to God; give food to Christ. Move Him by the prayers of many to grant you to carry out the glory of virginity, and to succeed in coming to the Lord’s rewards.  There entrust your treasures, where no thief digs through, where no insidious plunderer breaks in. Prepare for yourself possessions; but let them rather be heavenly ones, where neither rust wears out, nor hail bruises, nor sun burns, nor rain spoils your fruits constant and perennial, and free from all contact of worldly injury. For in this very matter you are sinning against God, if you think that riches were given you by Him for this purpose, to enjoy them thoroughly, without a view to salvation. For God gave man also a voice; and yet love-songs and indecent things are not on that account to be sung. And God willed iron to be for the culture of the earth, but not on that account must murders be committed. Or because God ordained incense, and wine, and fire, are we thence to sacrifice to idols? Or because the flocks of cattle abound in your fields, ought you to immolate victims and offerings to the gods?  Otherwise a large estate is a temptation, unless the wealth minister to good uses; so that every man, in proportion to his wealth, ought by his patrimony rather to redeem his transgressions than to increase them.

St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Dress of Virgins, 11

History of Russian Art

Where two or three gather together

Nor let any deceive themselves by a futile interpretation, in respect of the Lord having said, “Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Corrupters and false interpreters of the Gospel quote the last words, and lay aside the former ones, remembering part, and craftily suppressing part: as they themselves are separated from the Church, so they cut off the substance of one section. For the Lord, when He would urge unanimity and peace upon His disciples, said, “I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth touching anything that ye shall ask, it shall be given you by my Father which is in heaven. For wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, I am with them;” showing that most is given, not to the multitude, but to the unanimity of those that pray. “If,” He says, “two of you shall agree on earth:” He placed agreement first; He has made the concord of peace a prerequisite; He taught that we should agree firmly and faithfully. But how can he agree with any one who does not agree with the body of the Church itself, and with the universal brotherhood? How can two or three be assembled together in Christ’s name, who, it is evident, are separated from Christ and from His Gospel? For we have not withdrawn from them, but they from us; and since heresies and schisms have risen subsequently, from their establishment for themselves of diverse places of worship, they have forsaken the Head and Source of the truth. But the Lord speaks concerning His Church, and to those also who are in the Church He speaks, that if they are in agreement, if according to what He commanded and admonished, although only two or three gathered together with unanimity should pray—though they be only two or three—they may obtain from the majesty of God what they ask. “Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, I,” says He, “am with them;” that is, with the simple and peaceable—with those who fear God and keep God’s commandments. With these, although only two or three, He said that He was, in the same manner as He was with the three youths in the fiery furnace; and because they abode towards God in simplicity, and in unanimity among themselves, He animated them, in the midst of the surrounding flames, with the breath of dew: in the way in which, with the two apostles shut up in prison, because they were simple-minded and of one mind, He Himself was present; He Himself, having loosed the bolts of the dungeon, placed them again in the market-place, that they might declare to the multitude the word which they faithfully preached. When, therefore, in His commandments He lays it down, and says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am with them,” He does not divide men from the Church, seeing that He Himself ordained and made the Church; but rebuking the faithless for their discord, and commending peace by His word to the faithful, He shows that He is rather with two or three who pray with one mind, than with a great many who differ, and that more can be obtained by the discordant prayer of a few, than by the discordant supplication of many.

St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Unity of the Church, 12

Ancient Anti-Judaism

The Round Table: Episode 0

Freedom of speech

Intellectual history of race

Book review: The Mind of the Universe: Understanding Science and Religion by Mariano Artigas

On one extreme of the debate concerning science and religion today are those who mistake the stagnant and mechanistic view of the universe propagating by certain Enlightenment thinkers for the mainstream of Christian thought. On the other extreme are those who mistake the naturalistic methodology of modern science for a system of metaphysics. Both extremes, the creationists and the atheists/physicalists, ultimately undermine science itself. Each wants to reduce science to a state in which it cannot function and to undermine the two foundational pillars of Western Civilization: faith and reason.

In this book, Father Mariano Artigas sets the record straight, philosophically, historically, and theologically. He begins by giving us a tour of the history of science and where the ontological and epistemological presuppositions that underpin it emerged from. He moves on to demonstrating that without these presuppositions, which are being undermined by extreme movements within and around science, science itself must cease to exist as we know it and all scientific knowledge is undermined. Finally, he offers us a vision of a worldview that takes both science and religion, or physics and metaphysics, into account in a serious way and integrates the entirety of the human experience.

Throughout, Artigas is thorough in both his argumentation and his documentation. There is hardly a page in his book without references to some of the greatest thinkers of the modern era or of earlier periods, such as Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Aquinas, and Karl Popper. There is hardly an assertion put forward for which he does not provide a great deal of substantiating evidence and heavy argumentation.

Artigas's book is a needed corrective both to those who posit an anti-scientific creationism and those who posit an overly scientific scientism. To the creationists, he shows that science is the natural outgrowth of Judeo-Christian thought and that its recent findings fit perfectly well in line with the traditional Christian view of the universe as evolutionary, emergent, and creative. To the scientistic naturalists, he demonstrates that such a view does not and cannot follow logically from science itself and even moves in opposition to the newest findings of scientific research. To all of us, he shows a vision of the universe as guided by a Great Mind with whom we must choose to come into communion and cooperation.

The Mind of the Universe is the best book that I have yet read on the subject of science and religion. It is thorough in its treatment of the topic and a must-read for all who are interested.

Respectfully disagreeing

The Holocaust, Race, and Antisemitism

Enemies of civilization

Time is of the essence

Faith in reason

The world exists

How Christianity created science

Sometimes we are told that empirical science is a natural result of our observation and interpretation of the natural world, and that it was not born until the seventeenth century only because ideological prejudices, mainly in the form of religious doctrines, prevented its development. This idea is often associated with a positivist way of thinking that associates religion with primitive stages of humankind and sees modern empirical science as the obvious result of substituting observation and logic for religion. The historical record, however, is more complex and shows that the peculiar combination of the explanatory and predictive features in empirical science was a very difficult outcome that required a great dose of faith in the possibility of science. It also shows that religion, and especially Christianity, played a very important role in providing the kind of faith necessary for the beginning of modern science: a faith in the existence of the ontological presuppositions of science (the existence of a natural order) and of the epistemological presuppositions as well (the human ability to know natural order).

Modern empirical science found its only viable birth as a self-sustained enterprise in the seventeenth century, in a Western European world that, even if tormented by religious disputes, shared in unison the faith in the existence of a personal God who is the creator of the universe and of human beings. The universe, as the work of an infinitely wise, omnipotent, and benevolent God, was seen as an ordered world, and the human being, as a creature who participates in the personal character of God, was seen as capable of knowing that rational world and as having received from God the commandment to know and master it. Although pieces of natural science existed in ancient times, its modern systematic birth was only possible because for a long period many people displayed great ingenuity in their search for explanations about natural phenomena, guided by their faith in the existence of a natural order that could be uncovered by man.

Mariano Artigas, Mind Of The Universe: Understanding Science & Religion, pp. 182-3

Harmony of the cosmos

Reversing Pascal

Cosmologists for a long time have been intrigued by the question of why life appeared so late in a universe which has been expanding for 20 billion years, and why the density of matter in the universe is so small that successive generations continually relive Pascalian anxiety in their experience of the emptiness of infinite spaces. Modern cosmology supplies a partial explanation. Even if life were to develop in only one place, a large and old universe would have been required. Billions of years of cosmic evolution are necessary for the appearance of carbon producing stars, an indispensable element for the rise of known forms of life.

Joseph Zyncinski, quoted in Mariano Artigas, Mind Of The Universe: Understanding Science & Religion, p. 136

Intellectual history of science

Beliefs are important

Race and the Nazis

One thing that is abundantly clear from Nazi actions, propaganda, and literature is that they were obsessed with concepts like race, racial purity, and “racial hygiene.” Among the central tenets of Naziism were the beliefs in a pure Aryan race and in the innately inferior, and even insidious, nature of the blood of other races, especially that of the Jews. These ideas, like all ideas, have a genealogy, and what is perhaps most remarkable about these ideas is that very genealogy. The Nazi obsession with race and the uniquely Nazis twists on and responses to that idea are the product of a kind of “perfect storm,” a chance collision of a variety of otherwise unrelated ideas and events which led to catastrophic consequences. Foremost among these disparate concepts, as well as most important for an examination of why this Nazi obsession with race developed in the first place, are the European heritages of anti-Judaism and the scientific outlook that emerged from the Enlightenment.

Anti-Judaism, which must be distinguished from Antisemitism as a separate but related historical antecedent, began very early in European antiquity. The Greek conquerors and overlords of Judea in the fourth through second centuries BCE viewed the Jews, with their unique ritual and social practices such as circumcision and their insistence upon religious exclusiveness, with a great measure of suspicion and skepticism. While most were willing to tolerate and even protect the Jews as an exceptional people, some rulers, such as Antiochus IV Epiphanes, attempted, however unsuccessfully, to force the Jews to Hellenize and renounce their unique religious practices and beliefs.¹

The Greek distrust and dislike of the Jews was continued among the Romans, who conquered both the Greeks and the Jews in the second and first centuries BCE. While the Romans were willing to accept and make exceptions for unique Jewish beliefs and practices and large numbers of Jews emigrated throughout the Roman Empire, Jews were consistently mocked and looked down upon by Romans, who saw practices like circumcision as barbaric and the exclusive Jewish monotheism as potentially seditious.² This negative view of Judaism continued, and was even strengthened in many ways, when the Roman Empire gradually became Christianized beginning in the fourth century CE.

Christianity had emerged from a particularly unpleasant split with Judaism in the first century CE. Christians were viewed by the Jews as treacherous and heretical and, as a result, often suffered persecution and expulsion from the synagogues. This hostility on the part of mainstream Jews toward the Christians in their midst precipitated a final split between Judaism and Christianity. It also led to a great deal of vociferously hostile words making their way into the mainstreams of both Jewish and Christian literature and thought about the other. When Christians began to assume power in the Roman Empire several centuries later, these ideas about the Jews combined with the popular Roman prejudices to strengthen Roman anti-Jewish attitudes.³ These anti-Jewish attitudes, a combination of the Greco-Roman prejudices and Christian theological and historical disagreements, became the predominant view of Judaism throughout Europe for many centuries.

It is notable in all of this that none of these prejudices revolve around Judaism or Jews as a race or ethnicity, but as a specific religious group which one can join and leave by changing belief and custom. This began to change, however, in the early modern period. One element of the Reconquista in Spain was the forced conversion or expulsion of the Jewish population.⁴ When given the option of converting to Christianity or leaving, many Spanish Jews chose to convert. These conversos, as they were called, came to be viewed with a great deal of envy and suspicion by their Christian neighbors. Many suspected that because they had converted under duress that their conversion had only been affected for appearances and that they secretly continued to practice Judaism. In addition, many whose families had been Christians for centuries viewed with envy the children and grandchildren of conversos who were able to attain to important spots in government and in the the Church. As a result, the name of converso came to be applied, however improperly, even to those whose grandparents had converted to Christianity and the stigma of sedition attributed to the Jews continued to be attached to these conversos even after generations as Christians. What had been a difference in religion was coming to be viewed as a difference in race.

With the era of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans came to focus more attention and importance on science than on religion. Whereas the emphasis of the Middle Ages had been a primarily religious emphasis, which the denizens of the Enlightenment saw as superstitious, the emphasis of the Enlightenment was one of science and rationality. Rather than actually shucking superstition, however, many instead simply adopted a new set of superstitions or rephrased old superstitions in the new, more acceptable terminology.

This can be seen especially in the rise of Antisemitism from anti-Judaism, as constructed by people like Wilhelm Marr. “Marr” was among the first of those who “assigned to Jews the attributes of a race” and was the first, in 1873, to use the term “anti-Semitism” to describe this position.⁵ While an intellectual living in the wake of the Enlightenment could not take religious differences seriously, or, at least, as seriously as they had been taken previously, he could take supposedly scientific ideas like race seriously; Judaism, then, became no longer a religion, but a race, and all of the same superstitions and conspiracies which had formerly surrounded the Jewish religion were transferred to the new Jewish race.

One of the greatest ironies of the Nazi obsession with race is that they, while taking up this “scientific” view on Judaism as a race, re-translated it into religious terms. For the Nazis, race became a religious concept. As one Nazi ideologist, Arthur Rosenberg, wrote in his The Myth of the 20th Century: “A new faith is awakening today: The faith that blood will defend the divine essence of man; the faith, supported by pure science, that Nordic blood embodies the new mystery which will supplant the outworn sacrament.”⁶ The Greek incredulity at what they saw as the bizarre customs of the Jews, the Roman suspicions toward Jewish exclusivity, and the Christian theological and historical differences with Judaism, all of which had been matters of religious and cultural opposition, became, for the Nazis, attributed to an insidiousness inherent in Jewish blood. This was contrasted with the inherent superiority and goodness of pure Aryan blood. The Nazis took up a heritage of anti-Judaism and a pseudoscience of race to create their own unique racial religiosity which lay at the heart of their entire philosophy and practice.

Notes

¹ Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 49.

² Ibid., 278-9.

³ Ibid., 551.

⁴ David M. Gitlitz, Conversos and the Spanish Inquisition, ed. David Rabinovitch, PBS.org, accessed 14 April 2012, http://www.pbs.org/inquisition/pdf/ConversosandtheSpanishInquisition.pdf.

⁵ Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933-39 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 24-5.

⁶ Arthur Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1931), 114. Quoted in Schleuenes, 52.

Bibliography

Gitlitz, David M. Conversos and the Spanish Inquisition. Ed. David Rabinovitch. PBS.org. Accessed 14 April 2012. http://www.pbs.org/inquisition/pdf/ConversosandtheSpanishInquisition.pdf.

Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. New York: Vintage Books, 2007.

Rosenberg, Arthur. Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. Munich, 1931.

Schleunes, Karl A. The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933-39. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Surprising atheists

Book review: A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

“A sense of direction,” it seems, is what all of us are looking for these days. We live in a world that has made self-consciousness and self-interest our primary preoccupations. As a result, we spend most our lives in a state very near disorientation, simply moving from one place or person to the next without any impetus to our movement other than desire and whimsy. As a result, each of us tries to locate ourselves in a variety of ways, through adopting the structure of the traditional American family, through dedication to business interests, even through constantly running from distraction to distraction.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus's search for “a sense of direction” took him around the world and back again, literally. In his disaffection with life in the United States, he decided to move to Germany. There he fell in among other young people with a similar disaffection for life in their home countries and pursued the pleasures of the new art and literature scene, which included visits to secret raves and bizarre performance-arts, the indulges of the young and bored. With a friend, he decided to walk the Camino de Santiago, the famous medieval pilgrimage route in Spain.

The meaning and motion he discovered on the Camino led him to other pilgrimages, one in Japan and the other in the Ukraine. In his pilgrimage among pilgrimages, Lewis-Kraus begins to acquire “a sense of direction.” He brings himself to confront the underlying factors in his strained relationship with his father, a gay rabbi, and the mangled relationships he has had with others throughout his life. Most importantly, he begins to come to terms and to form a relationship with himself.

I recommend this book primarily as a simultaneously humorous and intelligent meditation on the existential state of modern man. The most important feature of the directionlessness of modern man, what is really at the root of his simultaneously self-love and self-hatred coupled with boredom, is his sense of the absence of God. The attentive reader is constantly painfully aware of this absence throughout this book, which gives such a reader a unique perspective. It seems that even as Lewis-Kraus, and all of us through him, craves meaning, direction, and purpose, he actively avoids it in his active avoidance of anything that might bring him closer to God: the pilgrim masses in Spain, the sutra-reading in the temples in Japan, the fasting and prayer in the Ukraine.

Lewis-Kraus's story is perhaps best summarized as the tragic reality of Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God: the Overman will not arise from the ashes, only a lonely and bored, hypercritical generation of selfish self-haters, looking for “a sense of direction” but never able to see what is right under their noses.

Christ is Risen!

Mere humanity & monkey morality

Atheism & intellectual cowardice

Christianity & Existentialism

The Great Shaving of 2012: A Tragedy

A question for atheists

Be kind

Book review: The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939 by Karl A. Schleunes

There is nothing which has so defined the world for the last several decades and which will continue to define the world for many decades to come as the concentration camp and the gas chamber. It is the knowledge that man is capable of the systematic and brutal extermination of his fellow man that has shaped the modern world. As Schleunes very poignantly phrases it in the introduction to this book, “if we are to begin to understand ourselves we must somehow come to grips with the reality of Auschwitz.” In his book The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, Schleunes offers us an opportunity to make sense of the senseless and to begin the process of coming to grips with this reality.

Before reading Schleunes's book I had a very different picture of “the twisted road to Auschwitz” in mind. It is tempting to want to see the perpetrators of such crimes as superhumanly evil, even as monsters. Schleunes, however, reminds of the reality, that those who created the concentration camps and gas chambers were as human as the rest of us, and that, as humans so often do, they largely bumbled their way into genocide.

Schleunes paints a picture of a perfect storm, a collusion of people, events, and ideas brought together by chance. Here are radical Antisemites of the lower-middle class whose hatred for Jews derives from a combination of culture heritage and envy. Here is a science only vaguely understood and manipulated for propaganda purposes. Here is a continually growing population of Jews. And here is the “Final Solution.”

Schleunes's book is a masterful account of “the twisted road to Auschwitz” which hits every bump and dip along the way. This is an important read for all people. It is only through understanding how we ended up there in the first place that we can fulfill the motto often repeated since the Holocaust: “never again.”

Who wants a theocracy?

Reading lately

Bahá'í Faith and humanity (part 2)

The significance of Pascha

Short book review: The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II (Great Books of the Western World, Volume 3)

I'm probably one of a very few people who has sat and read the Synopticon from front to back. Though it might seem like a strange practice, nearly like reading the dictionary or an encyclopedia, I can't recommend the practice enough. The wealth of knowledge contained in these pages is enormous, and you will be shocked at how quickly you can read 1100+ pages because it is so absorbing and difficult to put down.

Bahá'í Faith and humanity (part 1)

Book review: Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope by Amy Welborn

My grandfather had been suffering from a disease that had crippled his mind for quite some time. His memories were confused, incomplete, and, in many cases, missing. He was unable to remember the many faces and voices that made up the story of his life, including those of his own ten children. Even his sense of structure, progress, and time were gone. As members of my family who lived closer to him reported it, he believed near the end of his life, in 2010, that Jimmy Carter was president, and, worse, he believed he was a good president. In spite of all of this, when he was told that his wife of 58 years, my grandmother, had passed away, he cried and yelled that he wanted to go to his wife. A few weeks later, he died.

Amy Welborn's Wish You Were Here is a story about that kind of love and that kind of loss. Her story of the premature and unexpected loss of her husband is an insight into the kind of love that, like my grandfather's, overcomes decades of hazy memories and alters the courses of lives. In other words, it is a story about the kind of love we should all seek to cultivate in our lives.

We are told, as Christians, that Christ has defeated death and that death and sin have no more power over us. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, an early Christian writer, once said that “the business of a Christian is to be always preparing for death.” Death (and taxes) are the only things certain in life, as the old saying goes. And yet we still mourn for those we have lost. We still doubt and fear for what death means for them and for all of us. We still wish that we could only delay it just a bit longer. We still struggle with how this pain fits into God's great plan. We still feel the loss of their presence, even as we retain hope that we will be with them again in a better place.

Amy's story is that story. Amy's story is our story. Her husband, a pious Catholic, a loving husband, and a father to her young children, was taken from his family one morning. No one expected it and no one could explain it. In her efforts to deal with her loss and the loss felt by her children, Amy took three of her children on a vacation in Sicily several months after her husband's death. While there, they explored the beautiful and ancient cathedrals, churches, ruins, villages, and countrysides. They spoke with the people and experienced – often, endured – the culture. And amid those medieval buildings, created by men who lived and died and whose bones crumbled into dust long ago, and those people there today with their strange communal afternoon naps, she discovered something. What she found is not a way to make the pain go away, but a way to transform her feelings of loss into the yearning for something higher.

Soviet Society and Culture 1953-1985

A major aspect of the Bolshevik plan for Russia was to reshape Russian society and culture in the Marxist image. To this end, the Soviet government set about attempting to impose its ideals on the population via the influence of artists, writers, filmmakers, and others. In one sense, they were successful in creating a Communist artistic vision and imposing this upon the intelligentsia and, through the media, upon the rest of the Soviet population. In other more fundamental senses, however, they ultimately failed in their plan. “Indeed,” as historians Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg point out, “it is precisely in social and cultural life that we begin to see signs of the disintegration of the Communist order that would contribute to its collapse.”¹

Immediately following the rise of the Bolsheviks to power in late 1917, the Bolsheviks, in accordance with their liberal and progressive ideals, attempted “to nurture a spirit of collectivism and egalitarianism;” to this end, “iconoclasm and imagination were encouraged in the arts and literature.”² Soviet leaders implemented social policies that contributed to a radical restructuring of Russian society away from agriculture and family life and toward liberation of the individual and even “free love.” The previous period of Russian history under the czars was seen as a period that had stifled intellectual, social, and artistic growth, and had to be overcome. This initial period of relative openness did not last long, however.

As a new generation of Soviet leaders, especially Josef Stalin, began to assume power and the previous generation of radical intellectuals receded into the past, a marked conservatism took hold over Soviet culture. Laws were implemented that restricted the rights of individuals, much of the earlier utopian talk of liberation and equality was repudiated, and greater censorship of the arts was enacted.

Following the death of Stalin in 1953, later Soviet leaders attempted to walk the thin line between the oppressive social policies of the Stalin era and an absolute artistic freedom that would lead to open criticism of the government and its policies. In literature, for example, the post-Stalin era saw a remarkable tolerance for controversial themes and even subjects that might reflect badly on the the Soviet Union itself. Even “forbidden themes such as Stalin's purges and labor camps were briefly allowed,” though eventually banned once again.³

Great limitations were nonetheless kept in place throughout the history of the Soviet Union, even during periods of relative openness. One example is the Soviet reaction to the 1958 novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. While it was received throughout the world as a great work of literature, its publication in the Soviet Union was banned because the book, whose contents span the end of the Russian Empire and the rise of the Soviet Union, did not reflect a proper Marxist view of history. When Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his novel, the Soviet government prevented him from traveling abroad to receive the prize and he was widely criticized in the government-controlled Soviet press.

Another example of the Soviet back-and-forth between openness and repression in literature is the treatment of the author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His 1962 novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, written about the forced labor camps under Stalin, was published with the explicit and personal permission of Nikita Kruschev himself. Kruschev even openly praised Solzhenitsyn and his work, including leading a standing ovation for him at an official state dinner party, in which he happily announced to those gathered, “comrades, Solzhenitsyn is among us.”⁴ Only three years later, in 1965, however, Solzhenitsyn was banned from ever publishing anything within the Soviet Union again. He continued to write, however, and have his books published abroad, and was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union altogether in 1973.

This kind of vacillating and contradictory approach also marked the Soviet treatment of other aspects of culture. In figurative art, for instance, whereas the Soviet government had once encouraged innovation and expression and officially continued to do so, suppression of the arts was heavy. “In 1962,” for instance, “when Kruschev visited an exhibit of modern art in Moscow,” he proceeded to openly “mock it with crude humor.”⁵ Later, in 1974, in an even more extreme case of government suppression of the arts, “bulldozers were sent to destroy an informal exhibit in a park outside Moscow.”⁶

Because of this atmosphere of repression and especially because the Soviet government forbade a wide variety of emotions and thoughts from being expressed, such as any melancholy, pessimism, religious belief, doubt, or irony, the quality of the arts overall in the Soviet Union was very low. Artists, writers, and others believed that the arts in the Soviet Union had been “subordinated to revolutionary purpose and much of the complexity of life deliberately drained out of” them.⁷ As a result, many Soviet artists and intellectuals began to retreat from the public sphere and create small social circles and cliques “where new poetry or prose was read, art displayed, and ideas discussed.”⁸ Even among the wider population and especially the youth, counter-cultures began to form that focused on Western trends like rock music, new clothing styles, and sports. Public discourse in the Soviet Union had become so heavily regulated and any dissent or apparent deviation so heavily suppressed that people began turning to new ways to shape and express personal identity apart from the official Soviet doctrine.

It was in these pockets of culture that “dissident movement developed from the late 1960s into the 1980s.”⁹ Ultimately, this was the backfire of Soviet policy that would contribute significantly to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse. The Soviet attempts to suppress freedom of speech, individual identity, and self-expression were, like so many attempts to suppress the human spirit throughout history, doomed to failure from their very inception. In driving differing ideas out of the public sphere, the Soviet government had driven them into the place where they were most dangerous to the continuation of the Soviet Union: into hearts, homes, and other private places where they could no longer be monitored and controlled. By the time that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, assumed power in 1985, a significant segment of the Soviet “population had become alienated from the established order in their values, judgments, tastes, and beliefs.”¹⁰ This alienation would, in a short time, prove an unstoppable force and would put an end to the Soviet Union and its Marxist experiment.

Notes

¹ Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, Eighth Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 589.

² Ibid., 595.

³ Ibid., 609.

⁴ Niels C. Nielsen, Jr., Solzhenitsyn's Religion (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1975), 9.

⁵ Riasanovsky and Steinberg, 613.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid., 608.

⁸ Ibid., 596.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid., 597.

Bibliography

Nielsen, Jr., Niels C. Solzhenitsyn's Religion. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1975.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. and Mark D. Steinberg. A History of Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Nazism and Christianity

Any type of fanaticism has in it something which might be called religious. [Wilfried] Daim, however, suggests a paradigmatic relationship between the Nazi and Christian views of reality. Every Nazi who believed the Jew to be his total enemy implicitly subscribed to what Daim chooses to call a theology of race, or "theozoology." Racial purity was for the Nazis a state of paradise; the mixing of races -- a Nazi equivalent of original sin -- defiled this paradise and led to the confusion of good with evil, superior with inferior, and thus to the inevitable decline of civilization. In its concrete form original sin was for the Nazis the mixing of the Aryans with inferior races. The only hope for redemption from this state was a deliberately conceived policy of what came to be called racial hygiene. Upon successful execution of such a policy a state of perfect racial purity would be restored. There is no need to distort Hitler's views to fit them into this framework. His self-image as redeemer of the German Volk was secure. He was fighting the Lord's work. His mission, in its purest form, was to save the Germanic soul from Jewish poisons.

Other Nazis often couched their anti-Semitic utterings in similar terminology. Hitler's chief Jew baiter, Julius Streicher, spoke of there being no deliverance for the German Volk without a solution to the Jewish question. Arthur Rosenberg, the party idealogue, went even further in appropriating familiar categories. In The Myth of the 20th Century he wrote: "A new faith is awakening today: The Faith that blood will defend the divine essence of man; the faith, supported by pure sciencethat Nordic blood embodies the new mystery which will supplant the outworn sacrament."

When the Nazi program was formulated in 1920 the nineteenth-century appeal for a völkisch Germanic religion was not left unheard. Point 24 called for a "positive Christianity" to combat the Jewish materialist spirit which was enslaving Germany. Presumably positive Christianity embodied the "new mystery" which Rosenberg had revealed. Rosenberg's sacramental analogy was an exaggeration even for the Nazis; still, blood did remain their holiest of precepts. In it resided the elemental life-determining forces and soul-like qualities of which they spoke. Who could prove otherwise?

While parallels to a Christian wolrd view do not demonstrate a causal relationship, they do demosntrate that the Nazis were unable to break traditional categories of thought. From a system which juxtaposed positive Aryan values against the negativism so inherent in the Jew there also emerged a simple system of ethics. Whatever served the Aryan cause was good; anything which did not was evil. Only with the advent of the Final Solution to the Jewish problem were the potentials of this system realized. Until then, racial mixing was seen as a shame or a disease and in Hitler's own formulation as "a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator."

Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933-39, pp. 51-3

Stupid speculation and the Resurrection of Christ

I've read a lot of stupid theological speculation in my life, a lot of scholars and amateurs positing that the resurrection accounts were, if not outright mythological fabrications, maybe not literal truth either, and maybe what happened was that Jesus's friends were so overwhelmed by his continued spiritual presence among them, that it was so vivid, it was as if he were really there, and all they could do was dramatize that feeling in these stories about empty tombs and breakfast by the Sea of Galilee.

I never bought it, and even less so after my husband died, after I stood there for four hours at his open casket at the viewing. Standing there, I came to believe that anyone who thought that the witnesses to the resurrection were really just copying in a spectacularly imaginative way -- well, those people have never been around a dead body, and for sure have never been around the dead body of someone they love and can't believe they've lost.

Because I'd know the difference between even the strongest intuition of a presence and the very real presence of the person I last saw lying in a casket if he walked in the door, tossed his lunchbox on top of the fridge, looked me in the eye, and said, Well, hello there, sister.

Those women who said they saw Jesus alive? Well, first, they saw Jesus dead. They did more than I did. They washed his cold heavy body, they wrapped it, and they were returning on that Sunday morning to those caves, that city of the dead outside the walls of Jerusalem to finish the work they had to stop because of the Sabbath.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they would know the difference.

I know I would.

Amy Welborn, Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope, p. 137

Slave Morality and Master Morality

Friedrich Nietzsche recognized that morality and ethical values in general are of the utmost importance for the way people live. Ultimately, one's morality determines the ends that one seeks to achieve and the means by which one goes about achieving them. Nietzsche took a historical, or “genealogical,” approach to philosophy in which he sought to find the origins of various ideas in order to determine their truth and worth. In his examination of the genealogy of morality, he discovered the origins of contemporary values in a revolt of the weak against the strong. This led him to contrast what he labeled as “master morality” with the “slave morality” which he believed opposed to it.

Nietzsche believed that, earlier in human history, a more natural form of morality had been predominant. He labeled this moral system “master morality,” or “aristocratic morality” (West, 2010, p. 149). This morality had been practiced among the strong, a minority which consisted of those who dominated the weak majority. It included “values such as courage, generosity and magnanimity or greatness of spirit” that “reflect[ed] … strength and vitality” (ibid.). These values, according to Nietzsche, were practiced among the strong and the noble. In demonstration of his position, he drew upon the examples of the heroes of the ancient Greeks as found in Homer's works and elsewhere. Among them, the strong held a mutual respect for each other and practiced these virtues in their interactions but held a contempt and disdain for the weak.

The weak, according to Nietzsche, had a morality of their own. This “slave morality” saw things as “good and evil” rather than “good and bad” as the master morality posited (ibid.). Whereas master morality was based on a mutual reciprocation among the equally strong, slave morality sought to force all, including the strong, to become equal. The slaves, unable to create their own values due to their weakness, made morality a matter of force rather than freedom, as among the masters, who could create their own values in their strength. In addition, the content of slave morality was such as was of benefit to the weak, including values like “pity, humility, and self-sacrifice” (ibid.). As such, Nietzsche saw slave morality as intrinsically tied to weakness and degeneration as well as inherently selfish on the part of the weak, a symptom of their lowness. Nietzsche saw the rise of slave morality as linked historically to the personages of Socrates and especially Christ. As a result of Christianity, according to Nietzsche, slave morality had become the prevailing moral worldview of Europeans.

Nietzsche did not confine his criticisms of slave morality and its origins to an argument against Christianity. Perhaps his greatest target in these criticisms were those inheritors of the Enlightenment who attempted to maintain Christian values without Christian theology. For Nietzsche, however, “when one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality” (Nietzsche, 1990, p. 80). Nietzsche followed logic and his genealogical method through to where it led him. As a result, he found that it was absurd to attempt to maintain a set of values while ridding oneself of the philosophical or religious foundations of those values. On the contrary, if “God is dead,” as Nietzsche famously said, all of the values based upon his existence and nature as understood by Christians must also be done away with. The atheists and other non-believers who continued to practice and propound Christian values were, then, just as guilty of continuing slave morality as were Christians.

According to Nietzsche, this slavery morality, forcing servile “virtues” born of the selfishness and jealousy of the low-minded, impeded the greatness of people. Those who were natural aristocrats, the strong and noble, were restrained in their powers by slave morality. As a result, they were unable to practice the master morality that their dignity and strength demanded. Nietzsche saw most of the Western philosophical tradition subsequent to Socrates and especially Christianity as the primary culprits in the propagation of slave morality. Because of this, he saw Christianity and Socratic philosophy as impediments to the human spirit and all of those who continued to espouse those values as impeding the same. Nietzsche saw the greatness of humanity as being prevented by a set of values he saw as beneath human dignity.

References

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1990). The twilight of the idols and the Anti-Christ: or how to philosophize with a hammer. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

West, D. (2010). Continental philosophy: An introduction. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Science of genocide

Darwin's notion of struggle for survival was quickly appropriated by the racists once the Social Darwinist raised the struggle from the biological to the social plane. Such a struggle, legitimized by the latest scientific views, justified the racists' conceptions of superior and inferior peoples and nations and validated the conflict between them. The racists' appropriation of these scientific categories won for racist thought a much wider circulation than its ideas warranted. What satisfaction there must have been to find that one's prejudices were actually expressions of scientific truth. What greater authority than science could the racists have invoked? A populace astounded by the changes in its physical and social environment already attributed most of these changes to science and technology. The addition of a racial science seemed no more than logical. Not all Social Darwinists were anti-Semites or even racists in any specific sense, any more than all anti-Semites were Social Darwinists, but the development of Social Darwinism gave to racism and anti-Semitism and the völkisch movement a foundation it would not have found for itself.

Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933-39, pp. 31-2

After Auschwitz

The realization that some men will construct a factory in which to kill other men raises the gravest questions about man himself. We have entered an age which we cannot avoid labeling "After Auschwitz." If we are to begin to understand ourselves we must somehow come to grips with the reality of Auschwitz.

Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933-39, p. xiii

The Silver Age of Russian Culture

The Silver Age of Russian culture during the first two decades of the twentieth century, roughly from 1898 to 1918, was a period simultaneously marked by a burst of creativity and a foreboding pessimism. This dichotomy and the general diversity of the era make it a difficult time to accurately summarize. Russian artists, composers, poets, authors, and other cultural figures of the Silver Age exhibited “aestheticism, mysticism, decadence, sensualism, idealism, and pessimism,” as well as a “sense of uncertainty and disintegration, of deep skepticism about all received truths and certainties, and a pessimistic foreboding … though also hopeful anticipation.”¹ In short, there is no easy way to describe the full range of Russian culture during the Silver Age.

The beginning of the Silver Age of Russian culture is generally identified with the publication of the periodical Mir iskusstva, or The World of Art, by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexander Benois in 1898. The periodical, published bimonthly for its first two years and monthly after 1900, was intended “to lead its Russian readers away from Realism … and to introduce them to the freer styles that were flourishing throughout Europe.”² Diaghilev and Benois saw Russian art of the late nineteenth century as stagnant and overly focused on the concrete. Through The World of Art, they attempted to expose Russian audiences to the art then popular in Western Europe and elsewhere throughout the world, which tended toward the abstract and the innovative. Their hope was that this exposure to new forms of art would act as an impetus for Russians to take up these new styles themselves. Their hopes quickly came to fruition.

“What followed was a cultural explosion,” according to historians Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg: “almost overnight there sprung up in Russia a rich variety of literary and artistic creeds, circles, and movements.”³ While a variety of young artists took up the call put out by Diaghilev and Benois, outstanding figures in the visual arts of this period include, for instance, Mark Chagall and Kazimir Malevich. Chagall pioneered a new form of painting that avoided the extremes of either realism or complete abstraction. According to James Johnson Sweeney, an expert in modern art, “this is Chagall's contribution to contemporary art: the reawakening of a poetry of representation, avoiding factual illustration on the one hand, and non-figurative abstractions on the other.”⁴ His unique style was a significant influence on surrealism.

Kazimir Malevich, meanwhile, established the foundations for a new style of art he referred to as “Suprematism.” In contrast to other, more representational artistic styles, Suprematism embraced the abstract and instead focused on basic geometric shapes like circles and squares. Perhaps the most well-known exhibition of Suprematist art was Malevich's 1915 exhibition in Moscow, which he titled “0.10: The Last Futurist Painting Exhibition.” The most remarkable feature of the exhibit, which included a number of Suprematist paintings, was the placement of the Black Square, a solid black square on white canvas, in the icon corner, the place where Eastern Orthodox icons of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other important religious figures would traditionally be placed in a Russian home. Though initially “most reviewers voiced incomprehension and even scorn in viewing these experiments in abstraction as a new way of seeing,”⁵ and even Malevich's friend and coworker Vladimir Tatlin broke with him over the exhibit, Malevich and his Suprematist school continue, like Chagall, to exert a considerable influence on artists even today. In addition to his influence, his popularity has also continued to increase; one of his paintings, Suprematist Composition, painted in 1916, sold for $60,002,500 at Sotheby's in 2008.⁶

Closely connected to the new movements in art were the new movements in musical composition and performance; Malevich, for instance, designed the set for the 1913 Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. In addition to this connection between artists and composers, many of the same themes and styles predominated in Russian music, which tended to focus on “the lyrical and elegaic to the mystical, Dionysian, and even apocalyptic.”⁷ The composers Sergei Rachmaninov and Alexander Scriabin represent two of the extremes of Russian musical culture in the Silver Age.

In the words of Riasanovsky and Steinberg, “Rachmaninov's work exudes gentle and lyrical spirituality, aestheticism, melancholy, and fatalism.”⁸ His two most important choral works, for instance, are both settings for services of the Orthodox Church, one for the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (1910) and the other for the All-Night Vigil (1915). Ivan Moody, a modern British composer whose work is also deeply influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church's liturgical traditions, has written of Rachmaninov's setting for the Liturgy that “musically, the Liturgy today seems steeped in the spirit of archaic chant inflections, however modern it may have seemed at the time of its composition.”⁹ This ability to combine the ancient and the modern into a single cohesive whole characterizes the greater part of Rachmaninov's works.

Alexander Scriabin, in contrast, was primarily “influenced by an eclectic mixture of Chopin, Wagner, Nietzsche, symbolism, and religious mysticism” in the form of the Theosophical occultism advocated by Helena Blavatsky; as a result, his work “offers a mix of Dionysian emotions, mystical spirituality, and pure sound.”¹⁰ His Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), for example, both revel in the sensuality, emotion, and individualism which Rachmaninov's compositions sought to transcend.

In spite of the differences between the two composers, however, Rachmaninov and Scriabin retain a number of similarities. Their compositions both draw and build upon previous Russian music and contain a great number of religious, especially mystical, undertones and philosophical influences. In this, they are both examples of the musical currents in Russia during the Silver Age.

Like music, poetry remained an important conduit for self-expression during the Silver Age, just as it had during earlier periods of Russian history. However, also like music, poetry took on a distinctly different flavor during the Silver Age. The poetry of the acmeist school, which favored a principled clarity, simplicity, and personal theme to poetry, for instance, focused on subjects such as “love, beauty, and sadness.”¹¹ The first published work of Anna Akhmatova, one of the most preeminent of the acmeist poets, for example, “reads like an intimate diary of a woman in love.”¹² Consonant with the acmeist focus on simplicity and individuality, “Akhmatova speaks about simple earthly happiness and about simple intimate and personal sorrow.”¹³ Like Russian music of the Silver Age, and in great contradistinction to earlier ages, poetry of the period reveled in the sentimental, the emotional, the sensual, and above all else the personal.

Though each of the great figures of the Silver Age of Russian culture is unique in a variety of ways and different from his or her contemporaries in style, approach, and interest, there are a number of features which bind all of the great artists, poets, composers, and other cultural creators of the Silver Age together and which allow them to constitute a single and important age in Russian culture. The Russian cultural Silver Age is characterized by both a radical departure from previous currents in Russian culture and a remarkable continuity with previous themes. The Silver Age perhaps stands out most especially for the vibrant creative spirit that ran throughout the arts and for the focus on intimacy, personality, and the individual. When the Silver Age finally ended with the rise of the Bolsheviks to power in 1918, a period of great cultural growth and exploration closed on a terrible note that, with its consistent undertones of foreboding, it perhaps expected all along.

Notes

¹ Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 450.

² Michelle Potter, “Mir iskusstva: Serge Diaghilev's Art Journal,” National Library of Australia News Vol. 15 No. 10 (July 2005): 4, accessed 11 March 2012, http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2005/jul05/

³ Riasanovsky and Steinberg, 450.

⁴ James Johnson Sweeney, Marc Chagall (Manchester: Ayer Publishing, 1969), 7.

⁵ Riasanovsky and Steinberg, 456.

⁶ “Sotheby's 2008 Financial Highlights ~ Sales of $5.3 Billion in a Down Year,” Art Knowledge News, accessed 11 March 2012, http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Sothebys_2008_Financial_Highlights.html

⁷ Riasanovsky and Steinberg, 453.

⁸ Ibid., 454.

⁹ Ivan Moody, “Rachmaninov: The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,” Hyperion Records, accessed 11 March 2012, http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/al.asp?al=CDH55318

¹⁰ Riasanovsky and Steinberg, 454.

¹¹ Ibid., 451.

¹² Leonid I. Strakhovsky, “Anna Akhmatova—Poetess of Tragic Love,” American Slavic and Eastern European Review Vol. 6 No. 1/2 (May, 1947): 2.

¹³ Ibid.

References

 

Moody, Ivan. “Rachmaninov: The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.” Hyperion Records. Accessed 11 March 2012. http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/al.asp?al=CDH55318

Potter, Michelle. “Mir iskusstva: Serge Diaghilev's Art Journal.” National Library of Australia News Volume 15 Number 10 (July 2005): 3-6. Accessed 11 March 2012. http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2005/jul05/

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. and Mark D. Steinberg. A History of Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

“Sotheby's 2008 Financial Highlights ~ Sales of $5.3 Billion in a Down Year.” Art Knowledge News. Accessed 11 March 2012. http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Sothebys_2008_Financial_Highlights.html

Strakhovsky, Leonid I. “Anna Akhmatova—Poetess of Tragic Love.” American Slavic and Eastern European Review Volume 6 Number 1/2 (May, 1947): 1-18.

Sweeney, James Johnson. Marc Chagall. Manchester: Ayer Publishing, 1969.