Frank Bruni in his continuing series (New York Times, March 31, 2022) "For the Love of Sentences" thanks a reader who picked up this gem from Andrew Sullivan's Substack article The Strange Rebirth of Imperial Russia. (I don't subscribe to Substack and I can't read the whole piece.)
The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of postmodern life into a new collective, ancient meaning.
My point: this is a hazard peculiar to those who cherish the modes of Christian worship characterized by the language and ceremony of past centuries. That could be many groups, including ultra-Orthodox, ultra-traditionalist Catholics, and some Anglo-Catholics (especially those of the Anglican Church in North America variety). The mainstream, Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Church where I am a member and sometimes worship has quite a number of younger regulars who are entranced by the "mystery" (a profound, mesmerizing allure?) of the re-formulated 1549, 1662 and 1928 language in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. (You better believe reformulated! No more prayer for deliverance "from all sedicion and privye conspiracie, from the tyrannye of the bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities.")
The profound, mesmerizing allure to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by can lead to disquieting fantasies. When I was in a very Protestant theological seminary in the late 1970s, certain students there were agog with the antiquity of Russian Orthodox worship, aided by the venerable and slightly scary, geriatric presence of Fr. Georges Florovsky. One hastens to mention that in 1979 that Russian Orthodox church was still very much under the thumb of the militantly atheistic Soviet régime, and that the profound, mesmerizing allure was enhanced by sympathy for a persecuted minority as well as implicit assertion that Russians weren't all bad, contra the ossified rhetoric of the Cold War west.
The seeds of a profound, mesmerizing allure to the recovery of meaning from past centuries was germinating, and unpredictably came to flower in the overblown, apocalyptic rhetoric of Ivan Ilyin, and Putin's Rasputin, Aleksandr Dugin (he of flowing locks and beard). The consequences of blasting away "all the incoherence and instability of postmodern life" and resuscitating "a new collective, ancient meaning" are now obvious to all, and should stand as a warning against those who romanticize parallel, Western "recoveries" as antidote to disillusionment with the shallowness of modernity. Russkiy mir in all its glories.
I might tell some of my fellow Episcopal congregants: you want to worship as in centuries past? OK: and throw in the complete suppression of women's rights and social role outside a narrow home-bound sphere, revive roaring homophobia and prejudice, and by all means re-assert property rights over other human beings. All characteristics of various Anglo-Catholic imperialist theologies of the 19th century. The past is all there, good and bad: you can't pick and choose.
Or: wisely adapt and retain your standing in modernity, with pointed and well-targeted critique of the shallows. Don't forget those previous decades or centuries, but do remember them—all of them. Before you blast away the incoherence and instability of postmodern life, consider carefully the consequences of the collective meaning that you seek to recover. The most powerful consequences are invariably those that were never foreseen.