I've been through a lot of changes in the seven months, much less a year. Family members in transition: my younger son finished a graduate degree at Yale; my spouse gently retired from active pastorates after 40 years. My own transitions: I retired in August, and moved to another state in December. I'm both figuratively and literally not in the same place I was a year ago.
While our lives change, sometimes rapidly, the church year placidly sails on,. Like a prism, each year presents a different angle, a different constellation of light and its refractions.
In 2022 I was coming to terms with the reality that I basically have been done with Anglo-Catholicism, as it's been called. It's not a bitter parting at all -- I've just moved on. Granted I was never part of the mainstream of that movement, however defined: I was always on the left fringe, and resonated most strongly with Anglo-Catholic socialists (whether Capital-S or lower case) such as F. D. Maurice, Conrad Noel, R. H. Tawney, or Vida Scudder. These are all generations ago, of course; the political and informally religious perspective of Pete Buttigieg is more current. I was very much influenced by folk at St. Luke in the Fields, New York City, three decades ago —and how that neighborhood of the West Village has changed since the 1990s! I was never part of the creakily conservative mainstream Anglo-Catholic or Ritualist movement typified by the Robert Duncan, a bishop who left the Episcopal Church to found his own sect in Pittsburgh over the issues of gay ordination and bishops.
In the pandemic, the Ritualist enterprise began to seem a bit more sketchy to me. I witnessed my own parish, Christ Church in New Haven, suddenly pulling back after insisting down the decades that the sacrament was essential to Sunday worship. In defense of Christ Church, its leadership was following the directions given by the Diocese of Connecticut, a discourse wholly captured by particularly zealous public-health experts at Yale, amongst other places. (Christ Church is immediately adjacent to Yale and is in many ways a university church.) Yale has lagged other Ivy League institutions when discontinuing pandemic restrictions, without much explanation. Why were restrictions more swiftly dismantled at Brown or Columbia? "Discourse capture" is a good expression of what has happened in Connecticut, wherever the leadership may have found it.
The unavoidable conclusion, however, was the contradiction: is the sacrament so essential? Or can that be set aside in times of pandemic? In addition, the whole vocabulary of 1928-style Rite I in the 1979 Prayer Book began to grate --so much angry-father-god language. In 2020 and 2021, in particular, given everything else happening in the world and in our daily lives, that traditionalist language felt more and more orthogonal --at right angles to the real issues at hand.
Now in Philadelphia, I have yet to find a church home, although a couple of communities seem promising. In particular, I feel addressed by the experience of worship at Old St. Peter's on Pine Street in Philadelphia's Society Hill. Worship there is certainly different (in a positive sense): the church retained its old pew-boxes, and the first portion of Sunday worship, the service of the Word, is from the west end, at the reading desk under a wine-glass pulpit. The Service of the Sacrament is led from the altar area at the east end, so the congregation literally turns around and sits on benches or pews facing the opposite direction to their orientation in the first part of the service. The building itself is both historic and evocative: built in 1761 and designed by Robert Smith, who also designed Princeton University's Nassau Hall, and is surrounded by the very old church yard (well, old for North America) --truly the ancestors are present, in a generalized sense.
Lent at St. Peter's is much lower-key than in my previous parish in New Haven, as is the ceremonial used in the church. Worship is based on relatively new supplementary prayers that use far more inclusive language, and far less father-talk. Major Lenten themes are present physically and symbolically: dust to dust (the church yard), the patterns of the ancestors, the physical structure that links present generations with the past, and the context of Philadelphia. Gun violence in certain sections of Philadelphia is endemic. Regardless of individual congregants' "sins lite," as I have heard it called, the social divisions and divisiveness of Philadelphia and the whole country cannot be avoided. Lent at St. Peter's is adults acknowledging to adults that we have all erred, as a society, and that a better way has been promised and lies open to us, whether present or proleptic.
I have made my peace with Lent in 2023. At least so far.
This past week I reflected on the unexpected convergence of two very different writers, sources, and (on the surface) topics: Katherine Karkov's book, Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia, and a blog entry by (Bishop) Nick Knisely on watching the light-weight series Ancient Aliens, and its implicit (and occasionally explicit) racism.
grazie di D. DiBartolomeo, Università Teramo
Karkov's writing is pointed. “Anglo-Saxon England has always been an imaginary place.” (p.1) A loaded term, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ has a history of very hazy meanings. Susan Oosthuizen notes the confusing early documentary evidence of “Old English” (sometimes also called “Anglo-Saxon”) from a mention of Englisc in Aethelbert’s law code of about 600 C.E., and in Bede, ca. 731. (The Emergence of the English, p.1) The nomenclature “Anglo-Saxon” was first used by Carolingian writers to distinguish those on the continent speaking Saxon or other Germanic languages from those in the island of the Angli. (Edward James, Europe’s Barbarians, p. 123). Conventionally the term has referred to those who lived in much of what is now England from 400 to 1100 C.E., a span of 700 years conventionally divided into three periods that exhibit marked differences. (Oosthuizen, p. 1)
The phrase "Anglo-Saxon" willy-nilly throws together disparate peoples who arrived on the island of Great Britain, roughly 400-600 C.E., from many places, including Southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Presumed cultural cohesion is very hard to trace, as is the implied assumption that those denominated as Anglo-Saxons did not assimilate readily with the majority of the island’s residents who had already lived there a long time, whether they were of Celtic, Gallic, or other origins. Oosthuizen concludes, “The apparent clarity, cohesiveness, and implied cultural identity of the phrase “Anglo-Saxon" is a chimera that shimmers into invisibility as one approaches it.” (p. 4)
Karkov’s point is that "Anglo-Saxon" as a term denoting a people, cultural identity, or even language was a construct of the educated elite of Norman England, and then thei heirs in many succeeding generations. “Anglo-Saxon England is an ultimately empty space onto and into which identities and ideologies have been written, a floating signifier.” (p.2) The island that seemed to be on the edge of the world known to Europeans (ignoring Ireland, as usual) occupied a liminal space between the known and the unknown—a true midgard—of exceptional purity that inherited an imperial dream from Roman remnants and antecedents, culminating in the conviction that the English (or Anglo-Saxons) ought to be the rightful rulers of the earth. (Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World, p. 21)
The Anglo-Saxon cultural domain continues to be re-imagined today in violent nationalist and racist ways based on a set of powerful and enduring origin legends. Those legends hold that those arrivals from the Continent and elsewhere imagined for themselves a distinctive outlook and coherent culture. Evidence of cohesion is almost impossible to find. What is found and famous, cultural works (such as Beowulf and the Franks Casket) that were originally produced for local purposes, were pressed into service generations later to justify the displacement and exile of indigenous peoples by self-referential heirs to the "Anglo-Saxons."
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. The term "Anglo-Saxon" has become an expression for what Karkov terms retrotopia.
Retrotopia "involves both a looking back to an idealized past and a metaphorical migration back to it as a means of creating particular types of modern presents." (p. 24 and following for below) (The word was coined by Zygmunt Bauman in 2017.) Specifically, retrotopia refers "to the twenty-first-century loss of hope and community and the resulting location of happiness and communal identity in an imaginary past". Such a turn emphasizes tribal loyalties and identities, texts and symbols specifically associated with heritage. More than ordinary nostalgia (itself an eighteenth and nineteenth century coinage), retrotopia "is fueled in part by the digital technologies of the twenty-first century and uncanny isolated yet overcorrected state they create." Retrotopia creates "an undead past." Karkov vividly recounts the violence a retrotopia of "Anglo-Saxon" has done and continues to do, and she is ready to burn the field down and start over. Is that even possible?—leave alone advisable?
Karkov is concerned with the rhetorical use of "Anglo-Saxon" which is (and has always been) far more loaded than simply "Old English." It is one among several, alas. In the ferment of isolated yet hyperconnected individuals and online so-called "communities," there is more than one retrotopia.
Mary Beard tangled some time ago with internet trolls who firmly believe that ancient statuary and sculpture, now often presented as white-ash marble buffed to a finish, had to have been white and could not have been painted --despite convincing evidence that the ancients painted them. Beard famously took on the trolls. Somehow the concept of painted (maybe even gaudily) statuary violates an idealized of the Romans as "white." Modern racism just does not map neatly onto the ancient world.
Donna Zuckerberg (yes, related to that Zuckerberg) devoted an entire book to the misuse and misappropriation of ancient philosophy (especially Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius) and the threat that the alt-Right poses to classical studies. A "retrotopia" of Ancient Rome or Athens presents itself as "Western Civ" but carried all kind of internal contradictions, which usually remain unacknowledged. A retrotopia of ancient Rome has to sort out its allegiances in the Teutoberg Forest (glad the Rome lost? Or sorrow?), and has to navigate around the idea that the ancient Athenians didn't want Socrates to be celebrated, they wanted him dead (or at least exiled).
Is it because the real past presents so many complexities--even for those who care not a whit for complication--that the most facile retrotopia of all imagines "ancient aliens" and recasts them as foils for the twenty-first century? This is where Nick Knisely's intuition springs to life: that the stories told on that remarkably light-weight media series are always eccentrically mis-directed, invariably privileging the big names of "western civ" (such as the Egyptians or the Babylonians, who were of course not western at all) and ignoring Meso-Americans, southern Africans, not to mention ancient Chinese or ancient Indians. (--The last despite some of Indians' so-called "Aryan" status in the eyes of some nineteenth century Germans and their racist heirs.) The best retrotopia of all is one that never has to worry about annoying questions about real people and events from the past. Imagined aliens will always outmatch the pesky realities of ancient Romans.
Closer to home:
Christians are not at all immune from the currents that point to varieties of retrotopia. It's hard not to see the Museum of the Bible (I refuse to link to it) as a paean to ancient Judea and Israel, despite the visible reminders of ancient conflicts that often resulted in nothing anyone might call "blessed." Mainline Christians might quietly sneer at the primary Evangelical audience the Museum seeks, but are not immune to retrotopian thinking and feeling as well: idealized versions of the Reformation, or idealized figures of American Christian leaders, live on in sermons and homilies Sunday after Sunday.
Vaughan's concept of Christ Church, New Haven
I am a highly ambivalent member of a parish church that describes itself as "Anglo-Catholic," a designation I really prefer to avoid. It's not hard yearning and nostalgia in an implicit appeal to a glossy, idealized vision of a distant Anglican, Anglo-Saxon past. Various Anglican identities are steeped in memory, but too often memories can be invoked as a warrant for a liturgical style that dulls the edge of many ambiguous symbols. (The Good Friday liturgy and preaching too often just ignore the tangled and tragic history of Christian anti-Semistism.) Anglo-Catholicism was built (see, Keble, Pusey, Newman, and John Mason Neale) on a highly idealized, melancholic and nostalgia vision of purity located in large part in "Anglo-Saxon Christians" in some kind of pure past. (They might be better styled: Christians in the British Isles in late ancient and early medieval times).
Linking an idealized vision of a hallowed early medieval past with markedly Reformation language is a standing contradiction. Rite I can come off as seventeenth-century English prose (Episcopal Rite I) —Milton's language— dressed up in Aethelred's robes. What exactly are are Anglo-Catholic traditions trying to evoke? 597? King Alfred of Wessex? 1545? 1559? 1612? 1662? 1928? So-called "Anglo-Catholic" liturgical commitment just do not map neatly onto any of the several medieval periods.
That said, the roots to retrotopian longing run close to ecclesial nostalgia, but not simply. Retrotopia is well beyond the dignified melancholia of the type purveyed by Henry Vaughan (1845-1917, the architect of Christ Church, New Haven, and portions of the National Cathedral). Retrotopia is a fever-dream incubated in digital toxins. But it feeds off of a cultural nostalgia that is first cousin to the ecclesiastical nostalgia all too present in many ecclesial traditions (—not just Anglo-Catholic, Episcopalian, Anglican, or whatever you want to call it).
It behooves academic scholars of Ancient Greek and Latin literatures, medieval languages and literatures, and church historian sof several eras to beware of the mis-appropriation of important Christian symbols and discourse by those who simply cannot abide defenestration from a white Christian castle of supremacy. Historical study can curdle into nostalgia, nostalgia into retrotopia, and retrotopia into fascism. It can happen here.
Serendipitous scholarship recently led me to the work of Daniel Lord Smial, a Harvard professor of history who focuses upon "the history and anthropology of mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600" (his OpenScholar site), and particularly upon Marseille in the later Middle Ages. His interest in medieval material culture has guided his work with colleagues to create DALME (The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe), a database which enumerates, classifies, and collocates material and documentary evidence.
Smial's 2008 book On Deep History and the Brain initiated considerable discussion on the framing of general history as well as the impact that framing might have on medieval eras and subjects. Smial and anthropologist Andrew Shryock's subsequent Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011) further envisaged a complete account of human experience from the palaeolithic period until the present, and invited scientists and historians (humanists) to join in relating human history since about 4000 B.C.E. to "pre-history" (a questionable term that usually means the period of human history before inherited texts).
In On Deep History, Smial notes that the term "document" means (in its Latin root) "that which teaches" (a slight stretch from the OED entry for "document" as lesson, proof, instance, specimen) that came to mean a written instrument of some kind. Employing both the neurological reality and the historical metaphor of "the brain," the documentary divide between "prehistory" and textual history is at least interrogated if not yet entirely abrogated. Human neurophysiology is a constant interplay between evolutionary adaptions, evolutionarily unanticipated exaptations, and cultural developments that both take advantage of and further neuroplasticity, the ability of brains to adapt to new circumstances and unforeseen challenges. An exaptation is "a trait, like the large cognitive [human] brain, that evolved to serve some function but subsequently became available for entirely different purposes." (p. 127) (Exaptation is also a word that my spellchecker fails to recognize.)
On Deep History applies this line of thinking to psychotropic "mood-altering practices, behaviors, and institutions" which alter human experience and social, observable interaction. Mood-altering activities (not just those of humans: think of cats and catnip) and substances (alcohol, drugs) in specific cultural contexts interact with human neurophysiology (but never in a reductionist or "nothing-but" sense). Psychotropic mechanisms can be sorted into two broad categories: "tele-tropic" are "the various devices used in human societies to create mood changes in other people—across space, as it were (hence the "tele")." (p. 170). Their counterparts "are the mechanism that influence the body chemistry of the self, which we can call autotropic." The first are embedded in social practices; the second in specific individual behaviors.
Neither category necessarily must involve the physical ingestion of actual substances: an example of the "runners' high" -- "long distance runners can suffer withdrawal symptoms if they stop running, because their bodies are missing their daily does of endorphins."(p. 175). Religions can be regarded as using tele-tropic social mechanisms to induce or privilege certain kinds of behavior, such as meditation and prayer, which can be individual, communal, or both.
Smial is at pains to point out that evidence must be cited and evaluated very carefully. On Deep History is in no sense an invitation to simplify and anachronize. Unfortunately Smial tends towards simplification for the sake of argument. One example is Smial's own work on fama and reputation in medieval Europe, an extension of Robert Sapolsky's linking of primate grooming with post-lithic social gossip: a grooming, community-building mechanism that can relieve conflict and stress. Smial extend's Sapolsky's linkage by suggesting that gossip, one of "a huge array of other mildly addictive practices that are so marked a feature of many Postlithic societies," (p. 177) is an example of the kind of practices that states, societies, and religious systems spend so much time and energy seeking to regulate.
Christianity, for example, is remarkably consistent in its tendency to render as sin a range of autotropic practices—sex for fun, masturbation, gossip, alcohol. These autotrophic mechanisms, in some sense, "compete" with the effects of certain Christian teletropic practices, such as liturgies, rituals, prayer, and confession.
p. 177-178
This is disappointingly oversimplified. I am not objecting simply because Smial cites Christianity. Some versions of Christianity (Catholicism) have certainly objected to all four of his examples. (He might have cited ultra-orthodox versions of Judaism to the same effect.) Rather, could Smial also have cited those non-religious, social, teletropic practices that compete with "authorized" (or at any rate encouraged) Christian teletropic practices? such as:
money-lending (competes with some Christian teachings regarding charity),
hospitality regarding the poor (competes with other patterns of social power), and
Christian prayers for the dead (competes with other kinds of social practices regarding memory and the dead)?
In other words, why is masturbation necessarily a more autotropic practice than private prayer? Is gossip really so morally neutral as Smial seems to suggest? If alcohol competes with "liturgies, rituals, prayer, and confession," why does the Christian liturgy (as well as Jewish ritual practices) specifically include wine, and why do Christian (and Jewish) attitudes towards the consumption of alcohol vary so widely? Why the Kiddush on Sabbath evening? "—Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine." Alcohol in Christianity and Judaism is not just one thing.
Smial's suggestions regarding religious teletropic and autotropic practices are fascinating, but (to repeat), the evidence has to be treated very, very carefully: not because of ideological sensitivities, but because it can easily be pressed into extraneous argument for or against something outside of the scope of the subject. If Smial wishes to question Christianity, he is by all means welcome to do so: the more the merrier. But not by mis-using historical evidence when he presents himself as a historian.
Smial's On Deep History --both the book and the concept-- re-frame cultural and religious history in a manner that is both fascinating and fruitful.
In my own area of research, much might be learned by regarding early medieval Christian liturgies in the context of multi-lingual, multi-cultural early medieval societies with widely varied heritages and influences from both the ancient Roman world and the world beyond Rome's widest borders (especially to those interested in Roman frontier zones, both during and after Empire).
The concepts of neuroplasticity and the exaptions occasioned by developing societies can offer new analytic insights into both early medieval societies, and modern multi-lingual-cultural-perspectival societies. The evidence as always has to be treated with the greatest care. We are in Smial's debt that he started this conversation.
Recently I've have read in succession Philip Marsden's The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination, and Patrick Laurie's Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape. The first narrates the writer's challenging voyage by sail northwards through the western coastal islands of Ireland and Scotland, from Dingle to Ullapool. The second narrates a year in the life of a young farmer determined to bring back older, ecologically respectful, sustainable farming methods to a small plot in Galloway, an often-neglected southwest corner of Scotland. Each in his way narrates a point of view from a chosen periphery to the urban, digital culture that pervades our times, and each questions not only the cultural sustainability of such centers (or centres!)
The tension between center/periphery is a theme in scholarship about the Late Antique period in the scholarship of Peter Brown. In that era, urban elites sought to define Christianity formally at the same time that locations and individuals on the Roman periphery —the Holy Man in the desert, the missioner in Ireland, the so-called Monophysite Christians who took Christian with them on the Silk Road towards the East; the relative seclusion of the Ethiopian Churches—that these "peripheral" figures and communities possessed the imaginative power that characterized the passing of the ancient heritages to later centuries. The rhetorical power of the elites at the centers—Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem—had to compete with the powerful figure in isolation, and the sense that at the periphery the future was taking shape and would come back to characterize the center.
One portion of that geographical periphery were islands past which Philip Marsden sailed; another portion was the Galloway where St. Ninian founded Whithorn before his death in ca. 432 CE. Though connected to mainland Great Britain, Galloway may have figured as Pen Rhionydd in the Arthurian tradition of the three thrones of Britain. According to A. P. Jennings in the Oxford Companion to Scottish History, the name Galloway may derive from a Gaelic phrase for "stranger-Gaidheil," a people with Gaelic and Scandinavian ancestry. Its peninsular location meant it remained removed from much of the turmoil of the Scottish Borderlands, but the people are brutally treated after the 1603 Union in the Covenanter rebellion and subsequent wars.
This sense of periphery figures in both books, but in different ways. In Marsden's book, every Irish geographical feature has a story in the ancient sagas and annals, sometimes remembered by the locals, sometimes forgotten. The Scottish ancient annals figured poorly through subsequent violent wars, and some of the "invented tradition" (in the phrase of Eric Hobsbawm, 1963), or more accurately re-invented traditions. Hobsbawm's distinction between "invented" and "genuine" traditions founders upon the fact that all traditions, genuine or not, are humanly created, unlike some kind of natural deposit, and that "reinventions" may seek to express a long-standing point of view even in the phrases of a later invention, such as a "nation." Galloway has surely felt itself on the periphery of Scotland (and England) as have the western Irish counties. Nevertheless, Laurie roots his narrative in the geographical features that have long characterized Gallovidian lives, a felt geography as vivid as that of Ireland.
The sense of periphery has a literary function similar in each book: it serves to invert a sense of value, a sense of historical perspective, the sense of what's important. Both authors are lament of the trends of depopulation and marginalization, as though Galloway or the Western Isles were to become merely some kind of touristic theme-park for wealthy urbanites who seek a rest from the stresses of London, Dublin, Brussels, Edinburgh, or elsewhere. The dignity of the people who continue, dwindle as their numbers do, to inhabit these areas—dignitas properly understood as distinctive rank and traditional claim rooted in place—give ample reason to resist the arrogance of the social planners and politicians who are utterly alienated from any sense of place at all. Indeed the kosmos is not the polis—cosmopolitan does not in fact absorb and co-opt all before it in a newly imperial manner. (Perhaps cosmopolitan national planners, central bankers, and craven politicians are the re-invented tradition of 19th-century global imperialists, with all the self-righteousness of the self-possessed.)
Like the ancient sagas and traditions, the ultimate force of both books simply says, I was here. This was here. This world was here, and this world could be again a home for dolphins, curlews, and saints. In the face of catastrophic climate change, can this land, this sea, these people endure?
In April 2020—a stressful month!—I wrote two posts on the unexpected contemporaneity of Barth's Römerbrief and his use of the the word Krisis and its translation into English —and how that translation may have shifted its meaning in Sir Edwyn Hoskyns time and since. This is the last post I will write about The Epistle to the Romans, and I will return to reading Church Dogmatics, still in the first volume.
This modest essay will attempt to point to cultural events and sources that give Barth's book considerable nuance and were relevant to his time (and to his fundamental points). I have not read any study of Barth's Römerbrief that really attempts to put its first and second editions in the social, cultural context of Europe in the early post-war years. I am not really qualified to comment on Barth's German prose and how it compares or contrasts with expressivist or experimental styles in German literature of the post-World War period.
To recap: Barth wrote his celebrated theological commentary during his pastorate in Safenwil, Switzerland during World War I, and published it in 1919. It was an immediate sensation in German-speaking Protestantism, especially the substantially expanded and revised second edition, published in 1922. The second edition (lightly re-edited four more times until 1933) put Barth on the theological map of post-war Europe as one of the most capable "dialectical" theologians. In Great Britain, Edwyn C. Hoskins published an English translation of Römerbrief in 1933, as so-called Neo-orthodoxy was revolutionizing North American Protestant theology, offering a way out of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies and waning persuasiveness of much of "liberal" theology.
Barth's study in Safenwil, where he wrote Römerbrief. Phonto linked from the Swiss Reformed Church of Aargau
My topic in this modest post focuses upon Barth's modernist sources in Römerbrief. By "modernist" I mean cultural resources and allusions beyond his theological sources in ancient Christian writers, Reformation theologians, and "liberal" theologians such as Schleiermacher, D. F. Strauss, Albrecht Ritschl, and his teachers Adolf von Harnack (d.1930) and Wilhelm Herrmann (d. 1922). In addition, Barth's sources in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoyevsky have been well-studied; his sources in Friedrich Neitzsche somewhat less so (but neither neglected; see this 1995 article and this 2016 article in Czech ).
These "modernist" sources are really often more allusions or references to "what was everywhere in the air" (preface to the 5th edition, Hoskyns translation p. 21) The world of 1920s Switzerland and Weimar Germany, however, is no longer common knowledge, especially in period 1918-1922. A brief recap:
A series of unmanagable events and changes precipitated and resulted in unprecedented mortality in Europe. The Great War was fought in particularly difficult circumstances (both western and eastern fronts, and in the Atlantic) with disastrous decisions by military leadership and notoriously high casualities. Four European empires either ended or were profoundly re-shaped by the war: German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish; the French and British empires were severely tested and arguably began long processes of subsequent dissolution (by the 1960s). Constant rain and mud in the trenches accelerated the spread of disease and recent research suggests may also have accelerated the deadly H1N1 influenza virus that claimed millions of lives 1917-1921. The severe shortages of food and fuel in almost every country (except the USA) after 1918 also contributed both to increased immediate mortality and adverse generational health impacts that lasted for decades.
The period 1918—1922 was especially difficult in German-speaking countries; former large states split or were split into unstable polities; the leadership class was severely discredited; economic disasters churned every kind of instability into ruinously high inflation abetted by inexorable and completely unrealistic demands for reparations. Because of wartime censorship, ordinary Germans and Austrians had little real understanding of their armies' defeats, setting up a lost-cause mythology of "the stab in the back" (Dolchstoss Legende) which later was weaponized by Fascists. Years of workers' sacrifices erupted in demands for workers rights and pay raises (in a time of inflation) that led to severe labor strife and the real possibility of further revolution following the Bolshevist, Russian example. Other parties actively sought the restoration of monarchies or imposition of extreme measures.
Recently some of the atmosphere of Weimar Berlin has been vividly evoked in the television series Babylon Berlin (released 2017-2021), based on the novels by Volker Kutscher. Granted, "Red Berlin" was far from Safenwil and Basel not only geographically but culturally (and the novels are set in the later 1920s and early 1930s). Nevertheless, the depiction of politics, poverty, and social change, and post-war trauma elicits a sense of creative instability and an atmosphere of Krisis not irrelevant to many of the original readers of Römerbrief.
The 1922 world of Barth's Römerbrief is not entirely unfamiliar to us: political instability, economic uncertainty, social trauma, racism, pandemic. The Weimar world feels almost-familiar (but with profound differences from 2020s America or Germany as well). Ross Douthat (not a columnist I esteem highly, but nevertheless) wrote, "If the tragedy of Weimar is that it went through a doorway that opened into hell, the drama of Weimar is that so many doors were open, so many different political futures seemed entirely possible." Alienation, possibility, tragedy, trauma —all these social realities shade into the background of Barth's 1922 text, and into the foreground of Barth's reader a century later.
Several specific allusions or cases invoke this sense of almost-familiarity. The war is never far from page. The image of the crater (Hohlraum) occurs four times in the first 40 pages. (The English page numbers below refer to Hoskyn's translation; the German page numbers to the 2nd edition.)
Commenting on 1.3-4, The intersection of the "known plane" of God's creation with the unknown plane ("the world of the Father, of the Primal Creation, and of final Redemption") becomes observable and observed in Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus,
"the point where the unknown world cuts the known world. . . . The point on the line of intersection is not more extended onto the known plane than is the unknown plane of which it proclaims the existence. The effulgence, or rather, the crater made the percussion point of an explrding shell, the void by which the point on the line of intersection makes itself known in the concrete world of history, is not . . . that other world which touches our world in Him. Insofar as our world is touched in Jesus by the other world, it ceases to be able of direct observation as history, time, or thing."
(p. 29; cp. Die Ausstrahlungen oder vielmehr die erstaunlichen Einschlagstrichter und Hohlräume, p. 24)
When commenting on Romans 1.11-12, Barth writes, "The important of an apostle is negative rather than positive. In him a void becomes visible." (p. 33) (Ein Apostel ist nicht ein positiver, sondern ein negativer Mensch, ein Mensch, an dem ein solcher Hohlraum sichtbar wird. p. 29) --the void is in fact an Hohlraum, here a lacuna, but redolent of the crater (Einschlagstrich) above.
In commenting on 1. 16-17, Barth writes that the activity (teaching, ethics, worship) of the Christian community (Christusgemeinde) is strictly related to the Proclamation of the Gospel —but only insofar as "it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself." (p. 36, sofern das alles nur Einschlagstrichter ist, nur Hohlraum sein will, in dem die Botschaft sich selbst darstellt, p. 32) Anything so-called Christian but unrelated to the Gospel is a human by-product, "content would be substituted for a void, convex for concave," (sofern es allenfalls statt Hohlraum Inhalt, statt konkav konvex, p. 32) --Hoskyns' English softens the strong German metaphor, occurring so soon after the explosion of a shell.
This violent imagery of exploding shells and resulting craters works in tandem with the imagery of meaningless death and suffering mortality that pervades Römerbrief. When commenting upon Romans 6.3-4, ("we were buried with Him in baptism into death") Barth writes, "Death is not grace, if human possibilities are multiplied by it through the coming into being of a whole series of negative (?) things, such as asceticism, "back to nature," silent worship, mystical death, Buddhist Nirvana, Bolshevism, Dadism, and so forth: so long, that is, as the attack does not culminate in the final negation of the man of this world and all his possibilities." (p. 194).
Barth is entirely conscious of the range of movements and choices in exhausted, post-war Europe: he names variously Spartacists, Imperialists (restorationists?), Capitalists, Bolshevism, the "Russian Man" and the Proletariat, "open-air enthusiasts" (p. 508, die Abstinenten, Vegetarianer und Freiluftidealisten der Gegenwart, p. 512). Is this last an encoded reference either to Muck-Lamberty's Neue Schar (see below), or to the Freikorper-Kultur (FKK, or nudist) movement then ascendent in northern Germany?
One allusion in particular is a "cat's paw" for the militant strains of nationalism that will later metastasize into Germany's degraded future as the Third Reich. When commenting on 3.3-4, Barth wrote, "God is true: he is the Answer, the Helper, the Judge, the Redeemer: not man, when from the East or fro the West, whether or Nordic stock or Biblical outlook . . . not the pacifist, not the man of action; not even the superman" (p. 80, Gott ist wahr; Gott ist die Antwort, die Hilfe, der Richter, der Erlöser, nicht der Mensch, weder der östliche noch der westliche, noch der deutsche Mensch und auch nicht der biblische Mensch . . . weder der Wartende noch der Wirkende und auch nicht der Übermensch, p. 74.)
The same applies "Nordic enthusiasm and devotion to Western Culture" (p. 462 freely translated from, Es wirkt nicht eben als Bestärkung in etwaigen „Idealen”, ob es nun persönliche oder kollektive, völkische oder internationale, humane oder konfessionelle, deutsche oder westliche, jugendliche oder reife, konkrete oder abstrakte Ideale seien, p. 467) Barth is keenly aware of the tendency of the church towards idolatry: "Easter is not a representation in concrete form of the triumph of our lives or of our aspirations—of socialism, for example, or of the "resurrection" of Germany. ( p. 378, when commenting upon 10.6-7, Ostern [ist] keine Darstellung des Sieges unsres Lebens, unsrer Aspirationen (z. B. des Sozialismus oder der Auferstehung Deutschlands! p. 382.)
Barth's skepticism regarding the evolving language of nationalist Germany (recovering then from defeat) extends to his semi-ironic references to German leaders. Barth cites ironically Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (in the preface to the 5th edition, p. 23, es sei leicht ein Fähnlein auf die Stange zu setzen, aber schwer, es mit Ehren wieder herunter zu holen, p. 22), "whereas it is easy to hoist your flag, it is difficult to strike it honorably" —this from the father of the German fleet, and advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare, dismissed in 1916 and co-founder of the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei. Honor, indeed.
Tirpitz also appears much later in the text, in Barth's introduction to "The Great Disturbance," (Romans chapters 12-15), when commenting upon 12:1, on the subject of exhortation. If "exhortation be the exposition of the validity of grace, [then] it involves a perception of the pre-supposition of grace in all concrete phenomena. . . . [and] can therefore be undertaken only where the pharisee and the Publican have thrust together onto one step." Barth disallows any separation of sheep and goats, and exhortation is only possible where any "moral indignation against . . . a Tirpiz, or a Bethmann-Hollweg, or even a Lenin has entirely ceased to exist." (pp. 428-429; und also gar kein moralisches Ressentiment gegen einen Tirpitz z. B. oder gegen einen Bethmann-Hollweg oder auch gegen einen Lenin vorliegt; pp. 434-435). These are names that evoked enmity in 1922: not only Tirpitz, but against the much-despised Theobald von Bethman Hollweg, Chancellor of Germany in office 1909-1917, who had just died in 1921. Vladimir Lenin is much better known and in 1921-1922 had recently conscripted labor, and was expelling dissidents from Russia on the heels of the Russian famine of 1921-1922 that caused over 5 million deaths. Many of the dissidents and other Russians were gathering in German cities, especially Berlin. Barth's list is a role of dishonor indeed.
When a few pages on commenting upon Romans 12:2, Barth wrote that "there are actions from which the light of sacrifice shines . . . that the peculiarity of God . . . might be disclosed, and that He may be known as—Lord." This particular "enlightenment" disturbs humans, "whether they be formed according to idealism of a Ludendorf [sic] and a Lenin or of a Foerster and a Ragaz." (p. 435, Und dieses Leuchten stört den Menschen, den Idealmenschen nach dem Schema Ludendorff-Lenin und den Idealmenschen nach dem Schema Foerster-Ragaz, p. 441) What is the Ludendorff-Lenin "scheme" but the human as a completely ideological, politicizing being, whether in thrall to the nationalist right or the Communist left? Ludendorff was the German General who helped Lenin return to Russia, who was blamed for German defeat as well as personal cowardice (slipping out of Germany in disguise in 1919), and who subsequently led German nationalists in right-wing politics in the 1920s. His writings formed the basis for the ruinous "stab in the back" (Dolchstoff) ideology. Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster is less remembered, an academic who was a strong opponent of German militarism, in exile in 1922 after receiving death threats from irredentist German nationalists. Leonhard Ragaz is better remembered by historians and theologians as a founder of religious socialism in Switzerland, and an influence on Barth through the Socialist Party during Barth's years in Safenwil. These were all names that Barth expected his 1922 readers to recognize as controversial or infamous.
Finally, Barth's modernist world of 1921-1922 included reference to a then-well-known sexual scandal which has long since faded into obscurity.
Muck-Lamberty with followers; photo: Stadtarchiv Erfurt
Friedrich Muck-Lamberty (born 1891) grew up in the German fringe vegetarian and Wandervogel movements, which protested against German industrialization and sought to commune with nature. He spent the war with the German Marines on Heligoland, an island in the North Sea off Bremen. In the aftermath of the war he sought a rebirth of Germany through spiritual development of individuals. Blending spiritualist philosophy, German ethnic ideas, and what would now be called environmentalism, he called himself a "pioneer of a new age" and his followers hailed him "the Messiah of Thuringia." He placed women (the Eternal Feminine) in a salvific social role in which Christ-consciousness would be reborn amongst the Volk. (It should be noted that Thuringia was one of the places where the National Socialist Party [NSDAP] received its greatest support before 1933, and where the modern Alternativ für Deutschland has become powerful in the last 10 years.)
In 1920 Muck gathered a Neue Schar (new host or crowd) of young people who walked through Franconia and Thuringia. They gathered on Pentecost Day bound for the Wartburg (associate with Luther and German purity), advocating a nationalist commune against exploitation, and practicing meditation and an intense group life. Over 10,000 young people gathered in Erfurt, evoking the Children's Crusade. Although some Protestant clergy welcomed Muck-Lamberty and his crowd, Catholic clergy, workers groups and socialist parties condemned him, and German Nationalists regarded him as a "Bolshevik." In winter of 1920-1921 the group set up communal life at a rural hostel that was intended to produce handicrafts. Elements of this movement evoke the later "Summer of Love" of 1967 in San Francisco, and later communal experiments.
During that winter Muck-Lamberty was accused of sexual promiscuity and running a "harem economy" (Haremwirtschaft), accusations made particularly credible because of the strongly erotic and "naturist" mood of the movement. The group had to leave their winter quarters in February 1921, and Muck-Lamberty and the Neue Schar retired from public view. (Subsequently Muck married; he scorned the Weimar Republic, but kept his distance from the Nazis, then re-located to West Germany after trouble with the Soviet occupation. His craft business was continued by his children after his death in 1984.
Unsurprsingly, Barth was not impressed by Muck-Lamberty. When commenting an "an episode:" Romans 9:19-21, on human fallibility, "the appalling disturbances which can occur on the frontier where the Gospel is proclaimed . . . do not constitute an argument against the Truth" [of the Gospel]. Nietzsche's life (and illness) demonstrated that for humans The Truth is intolerable: when approaching God too closely, "they are thrown out of gear." So also for the conclusion of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, the destiny of Hölderlin, and ". . . the inevitable catastrophes in the history of the Baptists—Muck Lamberty—make it all too clear that . . . humanity has no alternative but death when confronted by the Truth." (p. 354, die unvermeidlichen Katastrophen alles Täufertums (Muck-Lamberty!), sie können doch nur erschütternd klar machen . . . daß der Mensch in seiner vermeintlichen Fülle, Gesundheit und Gerechtigkeit an der Wahrheit nur sterben kann, page 358).
Barth judged Muck-Lamberty very harshly, and it is a fair point that "the Messiah of Thuringia" had little to do with real Baptists—this is a derisive snort from a sometimes rather smug Swiss Reformed pastor (who himself would become involved in controversial household sexual relationships). Nevertheless, by referring to Muck-Lamberty, Barth pointed his central argument squarely against any such a "youth movement." The modernist impulse that in part moved Barth to write Römerbrief, especially in its pointed second edition, is part of the same cultural context that gave force to Muck-Lamberty's protest against industrial exploitation and the bourgois pretensions of post-war Germany. For both, all was not well (and would get far worse than they might have imagined i 1922).
Barth also has an unfortunate, sarcastic reference to "most heroic, most powerful prayers" of Prophets, Apostles, and Reformers, "not mention the artistry in prayer of the Ama-Xosa and the "Kekchi Indians" (p. 316, wahrhaftig auch das der Propheten, Apostel und Reformatoren, um von den Künsten der Xosakaffern und Kekchiindianer gar nicht zu reden! p. 320). Barth alluded to Friedrich Heller's book on prayer, which used "history of religions" and "religious psychology" disciplinary approaches which Barth despised. But this unfortunate reference also has more than a whiff of German-speaking imperialist racism, mocking as it does the Xhosa people of South African and the Qʼeqchiʼ Mayan people of Belize, Guatemala, and Chiapas state of Mexico. Xosakaffern in German is plainly derisive and racist (Kaffir). Barth's cultural references do not insulate him from the widely-shared racism of his time which mars his text in this passage.
Reading Römerbrief in 2020-2021 evokes a cultural and political context uncannily reminiscent of those tumultuous post-World War I years of populist revolt, social and economic disorder, famine, natural disaster, and epidemic. By summoning up the images of military defeat, the violence of the battlefield, the cowardice and ineptitude of national leadership, alt-right political language, and sexual episodes, Barth situated his hand-grenade of a book not only in dialectical theology, existentialist philosophy (as then known) and Russian literature, "masters of suspicion," (per David Tracey) but squarely in the provocative and perilous cross-currents of German-speaking Europe. His book, taken seriously, is still a hand-grenade of an argument in 21st-century Europe and North America (and very probably elsewhere as well).
MaryAnn Corbett is an American poet who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has worked as an indexer, is a medievalist, linguist, and has won a number of awards including the Able Muse Book Prize (2011 and 2016), the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and the Richard Wilbur Award. See also: Police Procedural
Observations Concerning the Role of the Anglican Funeral Service in the Murder Mystery
Man that is born of woman (saith the prayer book) hath but a short time to live, especially in British detective dramas since it is foreordained that some poor sod will be shot, strangled, drowned, or brained with a shovel before the opening credits and theme music.
And because in the midst of life we are in death, at least in prime time, he shall go to his grave, his procession filmed in an arty overhead shot with clergy in cassock and billowing surplice sleeves intoning, while the dewy detective sergeant gently pries from the grieving mother or widow some awkward bit that detonates revelation.
And then we’re off in a furious search for justice with sirens, dangerous driving, and rural scenery. Even a bumbling American such as myself is edified by glorious cinematography and the blessed assurance of the Psalmist’s pastures which are in Yorkshire, and his still waters in Oxford.
This gives us time to forget the Lord’s great mercy, which we have prayed for, but certainly do not want (pace the judge in robe and wig and cap) for the actual perp, whose evil, twisted soul is explicated by the genius sleuth in a five-minute last judgment.
Forasmuch as it hath pleased almighty God to permit in this life the deceptions that make for mystery, let us be grateful, collapsing in our recliners in the sure and certain hope that ninety minutes will offer us righteousness before we sleep.
A great writer, a misogynist, an Episcopalian, a great reader, a great friend to many . . . all those things are true. The poem below, nevertheless. Tolle, lege.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
Hisham Matar's book A Month in Siena is a beautiful volume that speaks of memory, loss, art, and finally some qualified hope.
Towards the end of the book, as he looks at Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo, painted around 1445, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. The painting shows pairs (and one trio) of individuals greeting each other, as if from a long absence or journey. Matar writes:
What is it for the dead to remember the living, I wondered, to still be able to recognize those we knew when the soul was flesh . . .
That must surely be the ambition of every reunion, not only to identify and be identified, but also to have an accurate account of al that has come since the last encounter. And it must surely follow that what lies behind our longing and nostalgia is exactly this need to be accounted for. . . . We want to be seen by [those closest to us] and, in turn, rediscover our own powers of remembrance, and finally to find the consolation that lies between intention and expression, between the concealed sentiment and its outward shape. The painting understands this. It knows that what we wish for most, even more than paradise, is to be recognized; that regardless of how transformed and transfigured we might be by the passage, something of us might sustain and remain perceptible to those we have spent so long loving. Perhaps the entire history of art is the unfolding of this ambition: that every book, painting, or symphony is an attempt to give a faithful account for all that concerns us.
Is that not the power of an education, even an education in the liberal arts, to attempt to give that faithful account? Is not the deep knowledge of the liberal arts the felt-and-touched experience of being seen by works of art, buildings, texts of all kinds, music, the biological world, the realm of physics? That something might sustain and remain perceptible to those we have spent to long loving.
Is this not exactly why an education in the liberal arts can never be marketed, and in the commodified space of the self as defined by neoliberal capitalism, so impossible to sell?
David Denby, staff writer and film critic for The New Yorker, published (June 29, 2020) an account of reading Crime and Punishment with a Lit Hum class at Columbia taught by Nick Dames, one of its best teachers. "Lit Hum," or Literary Humanities, is a required course for all undergraduates, and depending on the teacher can be anything from brilliant tour to an arduous trek. Under Dames' astute guidance, the students and Denby read Dostoyevsky's impassioned, digressive, and intricate prose and connected the critical passages.
Illustration in The New Yorker by Tom Gauld
The survey course in Spring 2020 took place throughout the great disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic; eight hours of discussion of the novel took place after the great disapora sent students from on-ground class in Hamilton Hall to a Zoom room wherever each might have landed. For Denby, the novel dovetailed with his life stuck in an Upper West Side apartment, hearing constant sirens, joining the 7:00 p.m. banging of pots at windows, sounds that connected isolated individuals in their social responsibility with the city's life, in the catastrophic solidarity of a Greek chorus.
Denby's moving account resists easy summary; I will not summarize it but pick out two elements that yet resonate now months later. Raskolnikov's haunting dream of social breakdown, a war of all against all in which each, infected by virus-like trichinae, knows that he or she alone is right, "each thought the truth was contained in himself alone . . . . They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good"—this dream struck several readers uncannily. One young student (Julia) saw in it a political science fiction, evoking our present conflicts and mutually-assured contradictions that brook no shared facts or vocabulary. She saw in the faces of demonstrators in Michigan (in April, armed and angry at their state capitol) the unshakeable convictions of blind self-assurance, just as the fury of those infected by the novel trichinae in the dream.
Raskolnikov's dream comes a few pages before the end of novel, an Epilogue that places the reader outside of the feral voices in Raskolnikov's head, so filled with conflict and outrage. Sonya, a teenage prostitute who befriended him in St. Petersburg, and despite his rejection even came to love him, followed him to a camp outside a distant Siberian town. He can no longer avoid confrontation with Sonya's lived, real-world "insatiable compassion" and the implacable necessity of his own suffering. He discovers that "instead of dialectics, there was life." Instead of acrid theories of banal murder, "he could only feel. . . . [S]omething completely different had to work itself out in his consciousness." Denby quotes Nick Dames' remark: "The novel is a strong rebuke to individual happiness and individual rights and autonomy." Denby concludes,
Every day, in Trump's America, it seemed as though we were coming closer to the annihilating turmoil—the mixed state of vexation and fear—in Raskolnikov's dream. . . . I kept returning to Dostoyesvsky's book, looking for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions and injustices, stoking hope and resolve along side fear, anything that would overtake the desperate anomie that Raskolnikov's dream had conjured: "In the cities the bells rang all day long: everyone was being summoned, but no one knew who was summoning them or why.
The bells led me back to the ending of The Brothers Karamazov, and perhaps a durable response to Denby's and Rasknolnikov's searches.
The Brothers Karamazov also ends with an Epilogue that ties up most of the complex narrative threads. A family drama, a who-dunit, a coming-of-age novel, and an ersatz romance (among many other angles), the novel is maddeningly difficult both to read and to conclude. Tthe characters' lives seem capable of carrying on with neither author nor reader.
After five hundred pages, an unlikely sort of Greek chorus of schoolboys emerges on the heels of a hitherto minor incident. The impulsive Dimitri Karamzov humiliated an impoverished Captain (Snegiryov) by pulling him out of local tavern by his beard. Snegiryov's proud, frail son (Ilyusha or Ilyuschechka) bitterly resented his father's humiliation and the mocking he had to endure from his schoolmates: he stabbed their leader, Kolya Krasotkin, with a pen knife. When Ilyusha threw stones at them, he accidentally hit Aloysha (Alexei Karamazov), the nineteen-year-old, handsome brother who is the moral center of the book: kind, energetic, and empathetic almost to a fault (as religiously very conservative for his generation). Alyosha reached out to Ilyuschechka and all the boys. They wind up obliquely commenting on adults around them.
The novel careens through Dimitri's trial, who is charged with murdering their wily, fatuous, knave of a father. His brother Ivan organized his brother's defense and orchestrated his planned escape, along with the machinations of two women (Gruschenka and Katerina Ivanovna) who forlornly loved their Mitya. Meanwhile Alyosha and the schoolboys inhabit almost a kind of parallel universe in the small, unnamed town, and the parallel drama of Ilyuschechka's death from tuberculosis two days after Dmitri's sentencing.
As Aloysha rushed from Katerina's decisive encounter Dimitri and Gruschenka, church bells summoned him and the boys to Ilyuschechka's funeral. The melodramatic narrative of alcohol, flowers, Ilyuschechka's frail mother, and the passage of the coffin to the church gives way to solemnity of the boys standing watch by the casket through the service. This bells are no western, tolling bourdon; the extravangant, Russian tinntabulation that builds up overtones and reverberates down the streets conjures the otherworldly play of light, incense, chanting, and movement in the old church, "rather poor, many of the icons were without settings." The author himself experienced such shock, loss, and splendor at the death of his 3-year-old son Alyosha in 1878, as he wrote the book.
Dostoyevsky, turned to Orthodoxy after reading the Gospels in a Siberian prison, and always paid careful attention to liturgical details. After the Epistle (probably I Thessalonians 4:13-17), Snegiryov "suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing beside him, that the reading had not been done right," without explanation. During the Cherubic Hymn (sung at the priest's Entrance to the Sanctuary), "kneeling down, [Snegiryov] touched his forehead to the stone floor of the church, and remained lying like that for quite a long time," prostrate before the divine splendor. Though the hymn's text is short, the chant is in a drawn-out, ethereal style, a human supplement to the singing of the heavenly hosts:
We, who mystically represent the Cherubim, And chant the thrice-holy hymn tot he Life-giving Trinity, Let us set aside the cares of life, That we may receive the King of all, Who comes invisibly escorted by the Divine Hosts.
"Let us set aside the cares of life" is exactly what Snegiryov still cannot do in his grief, clutching at the funeral flowers from the casket, as he crumbles bread crumbs for the birds who will keep his son company in his grave, symbolically receiving the King of all on his behalf. But rising from the cares of life is exactly what Aloysha did, when he and the boys came upon Ilyuschechka's standing stone, where the dead boy had cried out against his father's humiliation at Mitya's hands. Aloysha's speech to the boys concludesthe book, "Gentlemen, we shall be parting soon." He commanded them to promise never to forget Ilyuschechka, "whom we once threw stones at—and whom afterwards we all came to love so much."
And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune—all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, altogether, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.
Even should one of the boys become the "most cruel and jeering man," he "will still not dare laugh within himself at how kind and good he was at this present moment! Moveover, perhaps just this memory alone will keep him from great evil, and he will think better of it and say: 'Yes, I was kind, brave, and honest then.'" Alyosha implored them, "let us never forget one another . . . I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts, too! Well, and who united us in this good, kind feeling . . . who, if not Ilyuschechka, that good boy, that kind boy, that boy dear to us unto ages of ages! . . . . Dear friends, do not be afraid of life!"
And then the thrust of the whole book:
"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it really be true as religion says, that we all shall rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyuschechka?"
"Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been," Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy.
Then the detail both eschatological and incarnational: "Well, and now let's end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don't be disturbed that we'll be eating pancakes. It's an ancient, eternal thing, and there's good in that too." Kolya cried, "And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!"
The book's epigraph reads, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (John 12:24)
Karamazov's bells—ringing for Ilyuschechka, for the resurrection—answers the summoning bells in Raskolnikov's dream. A westerner might assume that the bell's summoning in Crime and Punishment is a single ring, perhaps fast as in colonial New England--but in a Russian city "the bells rang all day," many bells in vivid strike and reverberation. In this Epilogue, too, Dostoyevsky's mastery of liturgical details goes to work. "During the second week of the Great Lent, it was [Raskolnikov's] turn to fast and go to services together with his barracks" (undoubtedly because the whole camp would fit in or even around the church). The Gospel for that Saturday (John 5:24-30) is the same as was used in the Orthodox funeral liturgy for Ilyuschechka: For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself . . . for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation. While Rodya moped, Sonya acted on behalf of the prisoners and families stood in for the healing Christ; "they even came to her with their ailments."
"Raskolnikov lay in the hospital all through the end of Lent and Holy Week" when he recalled his haunting dream in this liturgical context—but never named Easter directly. The second week after Holy Week, recovered enough to be put back to work, Raskolnikov walked out of his work shed and looked across a wide, desolate river, to see an utterly different, pastoral people live free, where "time itself seemed to stop, as if the centuries of Abraham and his flocks had not passed." Suddenly Sonya was beside him, "came up almost inaudibly," alluding to Jesus' appearing to St. Thomas and the twelve (John 20:19 ff.), the traditional reading for the second week of Easter. Where Jesus showed Thomas his side, Sonya gives Rodya her hand, and "it was as if something lifted him and flung him down at her feet . . . for her there was no longer any doubt that he loved her," that he was capable of love.
"There already shone the dawn of a renewed future, of a complete resurrection into a new life. They were resurrected by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other." But this is no romantic fade-out: "They still had seven years more, and until then so much unbearable suffering, and so much infinite happiness! But he was risen and he knew it, he felt it fully with the whole of his renewed being, and she—she lived just by his life alone!"
All his past torments began to feel strange to Raskolnikov, unable to resolve anything; "he could only feel. Instead of dialectics, there was life." In response, he took the Gospels from under his pillow, from which she had read to him about the raising of Lazarus." He did not even open the book; he did not yet know the kind of new life that would not be given him for nothing, which still had to be dearly bought, "to be paid for with a great future deed. . . "
Denby's search for signs of how collective purpose can heal social divisions finds no easy conclusion in Trump's America now, as Dostoyevsky's found none in Tsarist Russia. Dostoyevsky seemed in retrospect to have sensed all the warning signs of repression, Revolution and the descent into the Abyss of Stalinism (and now Putinism). Whether in the Spring pandemic (and its Summer and Fall continuation), the continuing racial unrest, economic disaster, environmental apocalypse, and craven, hypocritical electoral and judicial politics, many Americans have completely disengaged from the Constitutional order. With all of our society's social and ecological danger signs are blinking red, is this search for signs in literature merely quixotic pursuit of bitter old people teaching impressionable youth?
I must answer No: Dostoyevsky's great books still offer us renewal through remembering our hope and suffering (such as the awakening to past and continuing witnessed this Summer). They can awaken us to responsibility for the ecological, public health, and economic mess that we have made. Both Alyosha and Sonya point to what is greater: "instead of dialectics, there was life," contradictory, complex, compelling and above all creative. Those bells summon us to engage neither domination nor surrender, but memory and hope: to remember the great, humane story of suffering and rebirth that transcends our mess (bad as it is), to the ancient and eternal act of eating pancakes for the dead. In Beloved, Amy said to Sethe while massaging her swollen feet, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts." It's hurting now: life instead of dialectics.
These summons also suggest the fevered, prolix, impossibly complex Angels in America. At the end of Perestroika (Part 2) Prior Walter, in his final febrile vision, tells the Continental Principalities (Angels) "I still want . . . My blessing. Even sick. I want to be alive." To which his Angel replies, "You only think you do. Life is a habit with you. You have not seen what is to come: We have: What will the grim Unfolding of these Latter Days bring?" Despite her vivid invocation of more horror than can be borne, Prior insists, "But still. Still. Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do . . . . I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate but . . . Bless me anyway. I want more life."
We live past hope, past dialectics, past disease and chaos. In this hinge of history, when horror meets horror and hope seems so much not enough, so inadequate — we still want more life. We still hear the bells summoning us to responsibility, thrice-holy, with the One whom comes invisibly escorted by Divine hosts. We stand at the stone of remembering, live past hope, and eat our pancakes for the dead.
Certainly we shall be resurrected, certainly, we shall see one another again and we shall tell one another happily, joyfully, everything that has happened.
Recently the author Michael Cunningham (The Hours, A Wild Swan) said that he had come to think of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain as "a book I’d spend my entire life intending to read." It wants focus and isolation (rather like Hans Castorp's years in a sanatorium on the mountain), "enormous in every sense of the world."
The Magic Mountain also reveals how the relationship between writers and readers has changed since 1924, "a reminder of a kind of relationship to a book that’s difficult to maintain, now."
How many of us, in 2020, can devote two months to reading one book every single night, all the more so when it’s a book that can be transcendent and can be exasperating? I’ve been thinking, ever since, about how the relationship between writers and readers has changed since Thomas Mann came and went.
Cunningham hated it on same days, adored it on others, and threw it across the room twice. Apparently he finished it, nevertheless.
I had my own experience lately with The Karamazov Brothers, in the translation by the late Ignat Avsey. Is that properly The Brothers Karamazov? Well, no; that title (of Бра́тья Карама́зовы) was a modest affection by Constance Garnett's 1912 translation, the English edition most available to most people. (There were others, including a significant reworking of Garnett's version for the Norton Critical Edition, 1976.) Avsey wanted to make his translation both readable in natural English and more faithful to Dostoevsky's rough-edged Russian than Garnett's adaptation of the novel's numerous voices, and dense prose.
I had my own experience lately with The Karamazov Brothers, in the translation by the late Ignat Avsey. Is that properly The Brothers Karamazov? Well, no; that title (of Бра́тья Карама́зовы) was a modest affection by Constance Garnett's 1912 translation, the English edition most available to most people. (There were others, including a significant reworking of Garnett's version for the Norton Critical Edition, 1976.) Avsey wanted to make his translation both readable in natural English and more faithful to Dostoevsky's rough-edged Russian than Garnett's adaptation of the novel's numerous voices, and dense prose.
Kay Bross, as I began to think of it, like The Magic Mountain demands two months of sustained reading—ideal for a time of pandemic and social isolation. It renders an entire world of a Russian provincial town named "Skotoprigonievsk" ("animal coral" or pen, a Russian version of fictional Winesburg, Ohio). Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel in Staraya Russa, a provincial town with several features that appear in the novel, such as the adjoining Monastery of the Transfiguration (Spaso Preobrajensky mon).
Spaso Preobraj Staraya Russa Собор Спасо-Преображенский: улица Володарского, Тимура Фрунзе, Старая Русса, Новгородская область: Wikimedia CCA:SA 4.0
The world of the novel has many voices: Ivan's tale of the Grand Inquisitor, his encounter with "the Devil," the life and sayings of Starets Zosima (a holy man), the formal, authorial account of the trial of Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov, among others. It represents an immersion in an intricate, class-based society animated by concepts of honor and holiness that clash with newer, bourgeois ideas of commercial value, transactional relationships, and the "science vs. faith" argument. Reading the novel demands a great deal of energy and attention, but pays off with its celebration of humanity, both good and bad, and the promise of grace and resurrection.
Certainly we shall be resurrected, certainly, we shall see one another again and we shall tell one another happily, joyfully, everything that has happened.
The Karamazov Brothers, Oxford World's Classics, p. 974
When Aloysha, the unforgettable, cherubic third Karamazov son says everything —in a novel of 900-odd pages—he means everything. Not a flower petal, not a spring onion, not a child nor a thief, will be left behind.
I first read Kay Bross forty years ago, for a class on Russian Orthodoxy at Princeton Theological Seminary, taught by the legendary Fr. Georges Florovsky. Father Flo (as he was known only behind his back) was himself a character from Dostoevsky: born in Odessa in 1893, the erudite son of an Orthodox priest, exiled in 1920, further educated in Prague, ordained 1932 in Paris, teaching at St. Serge Institute there, then St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestwood, New York, then at Princeton University until his death in 1979. I knew him only in his very last years, when he was entirely deaf in one ear, reading and commenting from his collected works. He was then a living connection to a lost world, a fragile, black-robed octogenarian on Mercer Street, a local saint living on the social margin of Princeton in the William Bowen and James McCord years.
Now forty years later I sometimes feel like a living connection to a lost world of prosperous, middle-class industrial Michigan as the working class began to decline even before the neo-liberal disaster of the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama decades. The world of Kay Bross seems only a little more remote. Its vivid testimony to the power of grace in forgiveness, loyalty, and resurrection has touched me in new ways in a time of fear, uncertainty, and viral pandemic.
Kay Bross needs the reader to come to life, and all of the reader. It is both uncompromising in its demands and unstinting in its full humanity. Its run-on prolixity approximates the pace of human time: sometimes fleeting, sometimes hardly passing at all.
When Aloysha drenches the earth "with 'the tears of thy joy, and love thy tears' . . . threads from all God's countless worlds converged in his soul . . . He wished to forgive everyone for everything, and ask forgiveness—oh, not for himself, but for others!" (p. 456) In that moment, something firm and immutable as heaven entered his soul: God's grace to all, the Holy and Wholly Other. Certainly we shall be resurrected, surely the Divine shall draw us to God's self and transfigure our health, justice, and relationships. Hurrah for Karamazov!
I had my own experience lately with The Karamazov Brothers, in the translation by the late Ignat Avsey. Is that properly The Brothers Karamazov? Well, no; that title (of Бра́тья Карама́зовы) was a modest affection by Constance Garnett's 1912 translation, the English edition most available to most people. (There were others, including a significant reworking of Garnett's version for the Norton Critical Edition, 1976.) Avsey wanted to make his translation both readable in natural English and more faithful to Dostoevsky's rough-edged Russian than Garnett's adaptation of the novel's numerous voices, and dense prose.