'In the beginning was the Act' - Goethe's Faust

I’m not sure when I first learned of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dramatic masterpiece, Faust, although it was probably around 11 or 12. I’m fairly certain I already knew of it when I saw a copy depicted as part of a small bibliothèque infernale on a poster for the horror-punk band, The Misfits. I think I must have purchased my copy of Walter Kaufmann’s bilingual edition some time during my stint at Barnes & Noble, likely in 1998 or 1999. What finally made up my mind to read it some day, however, was Jaroslav Pelikan’s statement in his brief ‘Personal Memoir: Fragments of a Scholar’s Autobiography’ (here) that he had begun the habit in his teens of reading the whole thing through in German once a year without fail.

By the time I came across that fascinating fact, I already knew of Pelikan’s appreciation for the German Romantic, having heard him refer to Goethe at a lecture at the University of Oklahoma in 1999 (I think) as well as having read his quote from Faust at the beginning and end of his delightful Jefferson Lectures, The Vindication of Tradition:

An older contemporary of Emerson’s, whom Emerson rightly regarded as the wisest and most universal mind of the century (except, Emerson felt obliged to add, for ‘the velvet life he lived!’), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, saw it all more deeply and said it all more clearly:

What you have as heritage,

Take now as task;

For thus you will make it your own! [1]

Nevertheless, despite this long awareness of the book and the inducements of Pelikan’s esteem for it, I only very recently began to read it for myself. When I did, I was very quickly reminded of the treatment of Faust in David Lyle Jeffery’s People of the Book: Christian Identity & Literary Culture, which I finished earlier this summer, so I went back and reread much of that chapter before proceeding further in Goethe.

Jeffrey draws some fascinating connections between Goethe’s depiction of Faust in his study and what DLJ calls ‘the symbolism of the faithful reader’ in the Christian artistic tradition. In this connection, I was particularly fascinated by Jeffrey’s references to the famous engravings of St Jerome by Albrecht Dürer (on which I have blogged a bit here). [2] Indeed, I would love to do some thinking through, or read someone else thinking through, the implications of Yates’s analysis of Dürer for an analysis of Faust.

The passage that carried me a little further outside Faust itself, however, was Jeffrey’s section on ‘Logos and Lector’, where he focuses on Faust 1224-37. I will quote in full Kaufmann’s translation of this passage, including in brackets the German for a few key terms:

(He opens a tome [of the New Testament] and begins.)
It says: ‘In the beginning was the Word [Wort].’
Already I am stopped. It seems absurd.
The Word does not deserve the highest prize,I must translate it otherwise
If I am well inspired and not blind.
It says: In the beginning was the Mind [Sinn].
Ponder that first line, wait and see,
Lest you should write too hastily.
Is mind the all-creating source?It ought to say: In the beginning there was Force [Kraft].
Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen,
That my translation must be changed again.
The spirit helps me. Now it is exact.
I write: In the beginning was the Act [Tat]. [3]

Now I admit that the import of all of this is most unclear to me. Why can Faust not accept the first verse of St John’s Gospel? Because all of this follows on his reference to attempting to translate the NT into German, I’m a little tempted to wonder if it’s more the German word Wort he’s objecting to, and not the Λόγος of the Gospel. But I admit that the successive attempts give me the chills, carrying as I’m afraid they can no longer help but do the crushing weight of German fascist association. [4] For his part, Jeffrey finds, ‘Faust rejects in this formulation the source of all Christian symbol, “the Law of the Lord”, but most specifically the Logos, the doctrine of the incarnate Word.’ [5]

My readiness to accept this reading, as undeveloped as it was, predisposed me to be a little shocked when I turned to another reference to this passage from Faust: the epigraph to Chapter Two, ‘Answerability & Ethics: Toward a Philosophy of Action’, in Alexandar Mihailovic’s remarkable monograph, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse. It had been some time since I’d looked at this book, and I only went back to it on a hunch (since Johannine logology was such an important part of Mihailovic’s analysis). Sure enough, at the heading of Chapter 2, we see:

Im Anfang war die Tat.

--Goethe, Faust.

Now, this was intriguing enough by itself, but it was followed immediately by a second epigraph:

The Formalists are imprinted with the seal of overripe clericalism. They are Johannites. For them ‘in the beginning was the Word.’ But for us in the beginning was the act: the word appeared only after [the act], like a shadow made of sound.

--Leo Trotsky, Literature & Revolution (1924) [6]

At this point, of course, I was fully engaged. Unfortunately, a quick skim through the chapter failed to turn up any further references to Goethe or Trotsky until the very end. There we read: ‘In a very real sense, Bakhtin inverts the Johannine conception of the conception of the word: for him, as for Trotsky--and this is the only area in which the critic and the revolutionary would agree--the act comes first, the word proceeding from it as its concretized efflorescence.’ [7]

Of course, I am hardly inclined to take this at face value. First, note that ‘word’ is not capitalised, either in Trotsky’s statement about its appearance after the act, or at all in Mihailovic’s statement about Bakhtin. Indeed, Mihailovic’s whole point seems to be that Bakhtin’s use of theological language almost invariably replaces the theological content of that language with discursive content. He takes what Christians say about ‘the Word’, and applies it to what we say about ‘the word’, i.e., discourse. [8] Second, Mihailovic himself states that for Bakhtin it is precisely ‘Incarnational theology [that] provides a framework for understanding the formal and material dimensions of the human community; according to Bakhtin, it unites that which has been separated by contemporary approaches to ethics.’ [9] If the rejection of Wort for Tat is a rejection of ‘the doctrine of the Incarnate Word’, as I’m inclined to believe it is for Faust, for Bakhtin it must mean that he cannot follow Faust as easily as Mihailovic seems to suggest.

Since writing that last paragraph, I have read very carefully through an interesting article by a Goethe specialist all about the passage I’ve been considering. I can’t say I have perfectly understood all of Erik Eisel’s ‘“In the Beginning Was the Word...”: The Question of the Origin of Language in Goethe’s Faust’ (here). The gist of Eisel’s argument is that Goethe is making his own contribution to the question of the origin of language, a question memorably essayed by Johann Herder, whose contribution to the subject directly influenced Goethe. I admit I struggled a bit with this aspect of the paper, but I fancy I’ve detected one or two things that dovetail with some of my reflections here.

First, Eisel strikes a note of what Harold Bloom might call ‘anxiety of influence’ in Faust. He asks, ‘Will the appropriation of this primal sentence [i.e., John 1:1] into his own primal writing scene establish a  pattern of continued undifferentiation? Or a hoped-for self-differentiation?’ Comparing Faust’s efforts to translate Scripture into ‘mein geliebtes Deutsch’ to those of his historical contemporary, Martin Luther, Eisel notes, ‘Unlike Luther, he cannot decide whether his translation of “word” into “act” establishes a pattern for the emergence of culture that differentiates him from tradition--or from the former self that he wants to escape.’ Later on, he makes two more comments along these lines. First, he observes, ‘Instead of employing a technique of free translation, Goethe depicts Faust using the literary technique of appropriation in order to transform the “original text”(Grundtext) of the Bible into a personal response to the question of language origin.’ Second, Eisel notes that ‘Goethe prefaces the scene...by emphasizing that translation results from a “personal desire” (mich draengt’s) to make something one’s own, “in mein geliebtes Deutsch ze uebertragen”...’

The last comment reminds me disturbingly of Pelikan’s favourite quotation, from earlier in the poem--‘What you have as heritage, / Take now as task; / For thus you will make it your own!’ Is Faust’s translation attempt a perversion of this charge, or a fulfillment of it? Hoping to get some feel for an answer to this question, I paid very close attention to precisely what it was Eisel was alleging as the object of Faust’s anxiety. In other words, what precisely is the ‘tradition’ that he associates with his ‘former self’ and which he hopes to escape?

I remain slightly unclear on this point. In one place, Eisel writes, ‘For Goethe, translation is the preferred method of creating a literary space where his literary creation, Faust, rebels against the Kantian universe with which he is familiar.’ Okay, so despite the obvious anachronism from an historical perspective, perhaps Kantianism is what Goethe is making his character escape from? But delving into Friedrich Kittler’s ‘wide-ranging work, Discourse Networks 1800/1900’, Eisel suggests an answer that may or may not be connected with Kantianism:

An ‘untimely meditation’ if there ever was one, the melancholic sigh in the opening monologue of Goethe’s play is an expression of Faust’s obvious disgust with the uncomfortable, high-vaulted Gothic den where he lives and works. It is, moreover, an indictment of the circulation of words and books being endlessly renewed with the Republic of Scholars and the Four Faculties. According to Kittler, the beginning of German literature is the dismantling of this obsolete discourse network and the self-generation of a narrative newly oriented towards the reader’s bodily experience of the text and of language.

To me this suggests something generally anti-intellectual, the equation of scholarship and the study of texts with dry, inactive, or ineffectual preoccupations, with a negation of vitality. It suggests that it is the whole tradition of Christian culture--represented first by the Gothic den of St Jerome and second by the traditional connotations of St John’s Prologue--that Faust wishes to distance himself from or escape. I certainly don’t think this tradition is in any way Kantian, though perhaps Goethe is suggesting Kant is a kind of logical conclusion of the tradition?

At any rate, it is in particular the way that Eisel describes Faust setting out to effect this distanciation that is in my opinion closest to some of my considerations above.

[At this point I had to leave off working on this post for a while, and returning to Eisel’s somewhat difficult essay, I found I had completely lost my train of thought! What follows is a much later and necessarily truncated attempt to reconstruct the direction I think I was taking with this post. I hope it makes sense in light of the above reflections.]

Eisel draws on a notion he finds in Kittler of ‘the theatricality of performance’ to delineate Faust’s self-distanciation from all the connotations of the Gothic den. At this point I will quote at some length:

It is not Faust’s proverbial thirst for knowledge that makes him an interesting case study for his diagnosis of a European ‘discourse network’, but his love of spectacle and of the physical effect of astonishment. Upon discovering the magic sign of the Macrocosm, Faust shouts out, ‘What play! Yet but a play, however vast!’ [10] Despite reservations about the superficial character of spectacle, he wants more of it, since it commands a sublimity not to be found in the drabness of his Gothic library. In Kittler’s opinion, this appetite for the sublime is something conditioned by the cultural media of the Enlightenment. Faust’s preference for theatrical gesture over linguistic expression grows out of a person ‘resentment’ against the word (Kittler 13). Accordingly, Kittler interprets the crisis of conventionality in the late Enlightenment as provoking the efforts of a new generation of Romantic writers to initiate a ‘paradigm shift’ within the traditional pedagogical scene that Faust describes in the opening lines of his monologue.

Perhaps it’s simply a conversation that I’m coming to far too late, but to me this passage is very obscure. That said, it strikes me that there are a couple of ways to read it. One is that Eisel and Kittler are discerning at work merely the desire for movement and action typical of youth, a desire writ large in the aspirations and fervency of the Romantic movement. But the other is perhaps more interesting. To my mind it may be that these two scholars are talking about an idea with which I have become increasingly preoccupied lately--the idea of poetic knowledge, and its cousin, that of ‘suffering’ or ‘experiencing’ rather than ‘learning about’ divine things (see this post). Although Eisel notes ‘the superficial character of spectacle’, in the enactment of drama (I’m thinking particularly of classical tragedy), we have a discourse that is in some ways akin to liturgy, where the mystery of knowledge is no longer confined to the ‘scientific’ learning of the text, but is entered into by experience with the senses and acted out. Is it possible that it is something not so far from liturgy that Faust is drawn to in his ‘preference for theatrical gesture’?

Either way, I hesitate to make too much of the Bakhtinian inversion of supposedly Johannine ‘word’ that Mihailovic believes he has discovered. If ‘word’ is to be equated with verbal discourse only, then it is natural that it lose its ontological priority, and we could perhaps do much worse than replace it with ‘act’ in the sense of enacting the mystery in which we participate. ‘Word’ can only be restored to primacy of place if it becomes again that Λόγος that dwelt in silence with God in the beginning, already full of the love that would act by creating everything.

[1] Qtd. in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1984), p. 82; see also the epigraph on the dedication page, p. v. The lines are 682-3, and are found on pp. 114 & 115 of Kaufmann’s edition, where they are rendered, ‘What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire if you would possess it’ (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, tr. Walter Kaufmann [NY: Anchor, 1990], pp. 114-5).

[2] David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity & Literary Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 214-5.

[3] Goethe, p. 153.

[4] My Webster’s New World German Dictionary supports Kaufmann’s renderings of the German terms, though it also gives other possible meanings. The first definition given for Sinn is ‘sense’, followed by ‘mind’, ‘feeling’, ‘spirit’, and ‘point’ (Webster’s New World German Dictionary, Concise edition, ed. Peter Terrell & Horst Kopleck [Indianapolis: Wiley, 1987], p. 389) Under definition (a), Kraft is translated ‘strength’, ‘power, force’, or ‘energy’, and under (b) as ‘power’ or ‘force’ (it is compared to Macht) (ibid., p. 258).

At any rate, as Erik Eisel points out, Hitler himself praised Goethe ‘for giving such prominence to “deeds” over “words”’.

[5] Jeffrey, p. 258.

[6] Alexandar Mihailovic, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U, 1997), p. 51. I have posted at some length on Bakhtin and the Formalists here, in a post which somehow earned me the accusation that I ‘hate literature’.

[7] Ibid., p. 85.

[8] In their useful, if flawed, intellectual biography of Bakhtin, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist quote Kenneth Burke in order to explain their assumptions about Bakhtin’s project: ‘As Kenneth Burke remarked, “statements that great theologians made about the nature of ‘God’ might be adapted mutatis mutandis for use as purely secular observations on the nature of words…”’ (Katerina Clark & Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin [Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1984], p. 83).

[9] Mihailovic, p. 78. [10] Goethe, p. 99.

Unexpected Communists in Books

The John Masefield collection I acquired Saturday at the McKay bookshop in Tennessee features a delightful little preface by the poet himself. Among other things, Masefield tells an interesting anecdote about one of his early influences, Pre-Raphaelite poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909): 

...Afterwards, while I was still playing with words and measures, I met with the work of A.C. Swinburne. Like most young writers of ath time I at once succumbed to his talent. He could do easily and supremely all those tricks with words and measures which the young craftsman longed to be able to perform. In my enthusiasm for him I paid pilgrimages to Putney and watched outside ‘The Pines’ until the little figure of the Master appeared and went trotting up the hill. 

I never spoke with him. A few years later, when he had ceased to seem the miraculous Master of the art, it was my fortune for many days together to sit at the same table with him in the reading-room of the British Museum. He was then very old, frail, and deaf. The magnificent head was all that remained of the prophet and seer; the rest was a little shrunken stalk. The late Mr Watts-Dunton [critic and poet who rescued Swinburne from alcoholism] used to bring him there, see him to his chair, and order his books for him; he would then bellow in his ear that he would return at one o’clock and take him out to lunch. This message had to be repeated several times before the old man could grasp it, and by that time the reading-room was aroused. Grave heads from every table turned to watch. Presently, after Mr Watts-Dunton had gone, Swinburne would turn to his books. I know not what they were, but imagine that they were of a merry impropriety, for the old man used to roar with laughter over them and, being deaf, never knew what disturbance he was causing. An Anglican Bishop and an Abbot of the Roman Church haunted the same table, and from time to time in that room a little, smiling, erect, cynical man, with a face which none could forget, would pass. This was Lenin, then studying, I believe, the psychology of revolution. [1] 

The collection of personalities at the British Museum at any given time is positively staggering. One wonders who the Bishop and Abbot might have been. But the big surprise of course was Lenin. Not that I’d never heard of him visiting London or the library (on which visits there is an interesting article here), but simply because Masefield and Swinburne, especially when followed swiftly by clerics bearing mediaeval titles, don’t naturally lead one to expect the next figure to be the leader of the Russian Revolution.

But this was not my only encounter with communism this week. Looking through Fr John Romanides’s Patristic Theology during the work on my last post, I came across once again the Greek theologian’s interesting comments about communism there. In a lecture entitled ‘Metaphysics & Empiricism’, he writes:

Today all the Marxists who live in Greece are empiricists. Of course, they do not realize this, because Greek ideological Marxists are not familiar with the Marxist family tree like their counterparts in Europe and America are. Overe here they just mechanically memorize their lessons in Marxism like a Jehovah’s Witness would. 

I think it is a real tragedy—and I am not talking about a tragedy fo Aeschylus, but about something shameful [Trans. note—‘Here, Father John is making a play on the words Aischylos and aischos.’]—that there are not any intellectually compelling Marxists in Greece. OF course, their absence is a windfall for the police, the political Right, and Modern Greek theologians, but it is a misfortune for the pursuit of the truth. Marxism started out with principles taken from experience and ended up where it ended up. From a scholarly point of view, Marxism and Patristic theology share the same foundation, so that if Marxists and Patristic theologians would come together, they would be able to communicate with each other. 

Although it is true that Marxism came into conflict with religion, we need to ask ourselves, with what kind of religion did it come into conflict? It did not come into conflict with revelation, but with religion that is identified with metaphysics.... [2] 

Make of that what you will. Although they have much nostalgia for Byzantium, in my experience, Greeks seem to remember so strongly the tyranny of the Turkish Yoke, followed by the tyranny of the German kings imposed on the country after the Revolution in 1832, followed later by the Military Junta in 1967-1974, that even devoutly Orthodox Greeks are much more sympathetic to leftist politics than their counterparts have been in, say, Russia.

It is of course ironic, though I do not plan it this way, that I have posted this on the Fourth of July. On one level, there are those who would argue that communism is unpatriotic, and they are probably right. But on another level, there is the fact that today Americans are celebrating a Revolution. True, the American Revolution was not as radical as those traditionally advocated by communism, but still I fancy I see some irony in the fact that many who would condemn communist revolution will nevertheless celebrate a violent rebellion against a traditional government in order to end oppression and set up a new and experimental form of government.

[1] John Masefield, ‘Preface’, Poems (NY: Macmillan, 1941), pp. v-vi.

[2] Protopresbyter John S. Romanides, Patristic Theology: The University Lectures of Fr John Romanides, tr. Hieromonk Alexios (Trader), ed. Monk Damaskinos Agioreitis (Thessaloniki: Uncut Mountain, 2008), pp. 178-9.

Review of a St Elisabeth Biography

Today, 5 July on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of the New Martyr Elisabeth of Russia. In honour of St Elisabeth, patron of my daughter as well as my mother (and likely, many, many other convert women as well!), I thought I would post a little review—written years ago in a reader’s journal I used to keep—of a secular biography of the New Martyr: Hugo Mager’s Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia (NY: Carroll & Graf, 1999). I have made one or two minor editorial changes, and added page references where I could still find them.

The first problem I have is the author’s utter ignorance of Orthodoxy. After repeated remarks about the ‘rottenness’ of the relics of St Seraphim of ‘Sarovo’ [sic], Mager concludes that this ‘should have barred him from sainthood’; [1] but a brief look into the glorification of saints in the Orthodox Church would have shown that incorrupt remains are not required by any means. He claims that all startsy (which he translates imprecisely as ‘holy men’) are ‘semiliterate, eternal wanderer[s]’; some of them ‘fastened chains to their legs as a sign of asceticism’, or ‘claimed to possess powers of healing’. [2] He gives a dramatic description of some schema-monks without apparently realising what they are. He consistently uses imprecise, western language to describe Orthodox things: ‘High Mass’, ‘Te Deum’, ‘Monsignor’. He repeatedly refers to the Roman Catholic ‘saint’ Elisabeth of Hungary, an ancestor of the New Martyr, as ‘St Elizabeth’ without noting that she was not Orthodox (a legitimate ‘bar to sainthood’ in the Orthodox Church). [3] He mentions ‘the monastery at Mount Athos’, apparently unaware that there are twenty. [4]

More importantly, the ignorance of Orthodoxy in particular seems to be aligned to a deeper ignorance of and lack of interest in what it means to be a believer, period. The spiritual life seems to him to consist mostly of consolations, feelings and sentiments, except where it’s expressed in charitable works—which, to his credit, he covers admirably. But the account of St Elisabeth’s life in the Ss Martha and Mary Convent is given short schrift in favour of a sensationalistic and historically questionable account of the fall of the autocracy. Even clothes, jewelry, and balls are given more attention than spiritual things.

But even from a secular perspective the book leaves something to be desired. First of all, there are quite a few typographical and grammatical mistakes (he spells podvig ‘nodvig’!). Then, there’s the historiography. Although it doesn’t give any credentials, the jacket refers to the author as ‘historian Hugo Mager’, and indeed, the appendix (‘Documentary Evidence of the Last Journey & Death of Grand Duchess Elizabeth & the Removal of Her Remains to Beijing’) shows him to be pretty good at doing historical scholarship when he wants to be. [5] But the rest of the book makes matter of fact assertions about the nature and motivations of various people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions about which—having read other accounts—I sometimes felt rather dubious. At the very least, how can Mager claim to know some of the things he does? He does not provide extensive reasoning or documentation behind much of it, probably because he intended the book as a popular biography and not a work of scholarly historiography. But some of the more extraordinary claims (like the allegation of Grand Duke Sergei Nikolaievich’s homosexuality, or perhaps more importantly, the ‘cool’ sexual relations which provide the basis for the allegation) could have done with a good deal more well-documented evidence (although sexuality might have been left entirely unmentioned in any case). In numerous cases, it is clear to someone a little bit acquainted with the subject that much of what is presented is founded on more or less unreliable testimony, including, in at least one or two places, that of witnesses whom Mager himself has discredited. Furthermore, serious scholars of the Revolution would disagree with the central rôle he assigns to Rasputin in the story. The latter certainly didn’t help matters, but didn’t Vladimir Lenin have at least something to do with it, not to mention well nigh irresistable historical forces?

Another problem is the author’s obvious biases: for Britain and liberal politics, against Pobedonostsev, Grand Duke Sergei Nikolaievich, the Russian peasants, the Tsaritsa-Martyr Alexandra, and certainly Rasputin (who, despite the testimony of multiple witnesses, is made to seem closer to the Tsaritsa-Martyr than anyone else she knows). One friend of the Tsaritsa-Martyr’s who was an admirer of Rasputin is consistently referred to as ‘plain and unintelligent’, and even ‘fat’, whenever she figures into the narrative. [6] The author’s opinions on politics are constantly interjected. Whenever someone becomes drunk, it is said to be in ‘typical Russian fashion’. He always describes the Tsar-Martyr—in typical biographer fashion—as ‘weak’ and ‘indecisive’.

But most annoying, I think, is Mager’s apparent determination to play up a dramatic contrast between the New Martyr Elisabeth and her sister, the Tsaritsa-Martyr Alexandra. St Elisabeth is presented as the warm, saintly, reasonable sister who does everything she can to save Russia, St Alexandra as the cold, self-centered, hysterical sister who does everything she can to ruin it. The author seems quite satisfied—often basing himself on the testimony of witnesses he himself elsewhere calls unreliable—to pronounce their relationship as being at distressing odds and ending in complete coldness.

There are good things to be said about the book. The author certainly reveres St Elisabeth. He also appears to respect Christianity, monarchy and, to some extent, Ss Nicholas and Alexandra. Passages like the note contrasting the ‘repression’ of Tsar Alexander III’s reign with that of communism—concluding, ‘Compared with its Soviet successor, Alexander III’s empire was a remarkably free country’—are really nice. [7] But Mager’s politics, his preoccupation with Grand Duke Sergei’s sexuality (about which he himself acknowledges that there is ‘no firm evidence’), [8] his ignorance of Orthodoxy and superficial notions of spirituality, and his exaggerrated antinomy between the two saintly sisters are all very annoying, and detract greatly from an interesting story. More importantly, Mager clearly lacks the experience and insight to do any kind of justice to the spiritual life of a great Saint. His Victorian psychologising is a poor substitute, not compensated for, in the end, by his attention to detail in presenting an in-depth story.

Those who want to read about St Elisabeth should stick with the Life by Lubov Millar, Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia: New Martyr of the Communist Yoke (Richfield Springs, NY: Nikodemos, 1991), only venturing toward Mager’s book for superficial and extraneous details about things like the Hessian grand duchy or Queen Victoria. Those interested in St Alexandra should never open Mager’s book, but stick with A Gathered Radiance: The Life of Alexandra Romanov, Russia’s Last Empress (Chico, CA: Valaam Society of America, 1992), by Mother Nectaria (McLees).

Addendum: Mary Mansur has just informed me that Nikodemos has recently published a new, expanded edition of Millar's biography of St Elisabeth, featuring all new materials. It can be ordered for $26.95 + $4 s&h. Just send a check to Nikodemos Orthodox Publication Society, PO Box 383, Richfield Springs, NY 13439-0383.


[1] Hugo Mager, Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia (NY: Carroll & Graf, 1999), p. 200.

[2] Ibid., p. 226. True startsy, or ‘elders’, of course, may well be educated, are rarely wanderers, would never display an external ‘sign of asceticism’, and would never claim to ‘possess powers of healing’.

[3] Ibid., pp. 19-20, 240.

[4] Ibid., p. 227.

[5] Ibid., pp. 343-9.

[6] Ibid., pp. 235, 255, 277.

[7] Ibid., p. 80. The final paragraph of this lengthy note deserves to be quoted in full:

However, these enormous powers [of the tsarist political police] were used with remarkable leniency. During Alexander [III]’s repressive reign only four thousand persons, out of a population of nearly a hundred million, were detained or interrogated in connection with political offenses; only forty-four, all assassins or potential assassins, were executed for political crimes. The right to travel abroad and property rights, even those of expatriate revolutionaries, were scrupulously respected. The vast majority of criminals were tried fairly, by jury. Censorship was little more than a nuisance: between 1867 and 1894 only 158 books, not including Marx’s Capital, were forbidden to circulate in Russia. Compared with its Soviet successor, Alexander III’s empire was a remarkably free country.

[8] Ibid., p. 74.

'A Successor of the Grace of Optina Eldership'—St Sebastian the Confessor

Today, 6 April on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of St Sebastian the Confessor of Optina and Karaganda (1884-1966). Although St Sebastian carried out his struggles as an Elder far away from the monastery of his repentance, in exile in Kazakhstan, in the decree of his glorification, Archbishop Alexei of Alma-Ata and Semipalatinsk describes him as ‘successor of the grace of Optina eldership’. [1] (For those as yet unfamiliar with the Elders of Optina, I have written of their number and glorification, compiled some links, and reposted an overview in a post here.) St Sebastian was renowned for his ‘soft-heartedness and compassion’. [2] According to his Life, St Barsanuphius of Optina called him ‘the grace-filled one’, while his own Elder, St Joseph, said, ‘He is a tender soul.’ [3] Here is a brief overview of his life by the compiler of the available material on St Sebastian at the time of his glorification, Vera Koroleva:

One of the last elders who grew up from the root of pre-revolutionary Optina is Schema-archimandrite Sebastian (Fomin, 1966)—a disciple [and cell-attendant] of Elder Joseph and, after his death, of Elder Nektary. Having absorbed within himself the traditions and the grace-filled patristic spirit of Optina Monastery and having been tried, like iron, in the furnace of fiery trials, enduring banishment and imprisonment in the soviet camps, he, by the ineffable judgments of God, bore his service of eldership in the sultry steppe of Central Kazakhstan, in much-suffering and blessed Karaganda where, during the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, one of the most tragic acts of the God-fighting drama of our century unfolded. The unbounded steppe of Kazakhstan stretches out like a massive antimension, filled with the blood of the martyrs and sanctified by their prayers, over which the Optina Elder, Schema-archimandrite Sebastian of blessed memory, extended his powerful wings. [4]

Even as a child, St Sebastian had longed to follow an older brother into Optina. He studied hard and ‘had a great thirst for reading’. [5] He worked as a shepherd, being very fond of animals all his life, and this gave him time for reading and prayer. Later, as a monk under the guidance of Elders Joseph and Nektary, ‘he developed the spiritual gifts which he had had since birth and acquired many new, lofty ones—the gifts of meekness, discernment, exalted prayer, clairvoyance, mercifulness and compassion.’ [6] He was eventually ordained a hierodeacon. After the forced closure of the monastery in 1923, St Sebastian followed his Elder, St Nektary, performing errands for him, and undergoing ordination to the priesthood, until the latter’s blessed repose in 1928 under the epitrachelion of the future Archbishop Andrew of Novo-Diveevo.

St Sebastian’s hagiographer, T.V. Torstensen, tells us the Elder ‘had a natural breadth of soul, a love for beauty in general and for the beauty of nature in particular. . . . He felt great warmth and love for art. There was a certain special softness of soul in him.’ She continues:

All of these qualities and all of his spiritual experience—acquired during fourteen years of life in the Skete and nineteen years of close daily interaction with the great Optina Elders, his life having passed under their guidance—predetermined his path toward active ascetic service to men, taking the most varied forms of help. [7]

For five years St Sebastian served as a priest in Tambov province, continuing to receive spiritual children. The Elder became a Confessor for the Faith when he was arrested and taken to the GPU in 1933. According to the files of the UFSB in Tambov province, St Sebastian told the authorities:

I look upon all the measures of the soviet authority as the anger of God; this authority is a punishment for the people. I have expressed such views among those close to me, as well as among the rest of the citizens with whom I have had occasion to speak on this topic. At these times I have said that one must pray, pray to God, and also live in love. Then only can we be delivered from this. I have been little pleased with the soviet authorities because of the closing of churches and monasteries, since by this the Orthodox Faith is being destroyed. [8]

St Sebastian was placed in a forced labour camp in the summer of 1933 and was transferred to Karaganda in Kazakhstan in May of 1934. He remained there, subjected to beatings and tortures in an attempt to destroy his faith, until the eve of the Ascension, 1939. A number of spiritual children, in particular a few of the nuns of Shamordino, followed him into exile and did what they could to help him while he suffered in the camp. When he was released, these nuns formed the core of a community of spiritual children who lived as best they could a monastic life in the world. As long as necessary, the Elder would conduct services in secret at the homes of the faithful. Torstensen writes:

Ah, Batiushka! Batiushka! How gentle, radiant and loving! Whoever was once with him at Lower Street will never forget it. Soon the residents of Mikhailovka learned about him and began to invite him over to their houses with liturgical request, since he could not receive them at home. After the daily refectory meal Fr Sebastian would take the addresses which had been left for him and would go to conduct the requested services until evening. Permission to conduct the various services had not been given, but he went without refusing. The people in Karaganda were faithful then. ‘Don’t betray him,’ they would say. Even the children, although they all knew, observed the rule ‘not to tell’.

People in other suburbs also heard about him and strove to come to see him. Yea, and not only people, but even the beasts as well. When he, small and insignificant, walked with his quick, light stride along the street of Mikhailovka in his long, black overcoat and black skufia, dogs would crawl out from behind all the fences to see him. They rushed, fearing to be late, to miss him. When the gap in the fence was narrow and they could not crawl through it, then, having sniffed the Elder, they would dig a hole with their paws under the fence in order to force their heads through and would lie there, flat as a pancake. Laughing, their owners would tell of this, and I myself saw it. ‘When Fr Sebastian walks by,’ the people said, ‘they crawl out like snakes.’ Where houses had low garden fences, the dogs would fly over them like birds. They would all decorously sit in front of their homes. They did not run out onto the street, nor did they bark at anyone. They would sit quietly, following the Elder with their heads as he passed by. What were they trying to express? Ah, the dogs of Mikhailovka! The dogs of Mikhailovka! How they impressed me with the keenness and depth of their dog souls and hearts. [9]

It wasn’t finally until 1955 that St Sebastian obtained permission to turn the very shabby house church in which he and the sisters had been praying into a church temple where they could hold the Divine Liturgy. Gradually, in order to get help in caring for the spiritual needs of the faithful in those dark times, the Elder brought about the ordination of three of his spiritual children to the priesthood. One of them, the former church warden, Paul Alexandrovich Kovalenko, ‘had competed several times, with the Elder’s blessing, in debates with a Baptist leader who had come to the church courtyard to put the “popes” [priests] to shame in debate. But the Baptist himself had been put to shame by Paul Alexandrovich.’ [10]

The Russian literary critic and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, in one of the religious debates characteristic of the early years of the godless communist regime was reported to have ‘complained of, and worried about, the fact that socialism had no care for the dead (as if there weren’t enough services for the dead!), and that, accordingly, in some future time, the people would not fogive us such neglect’. [11] Thus, it is interesting to note that the commemoration of the dead played an enormous rôle in the Elder’s ministry. Torstensen relates the following story:

Once the Elder was walking with the nuns Maria and Matha to the cemetery which lay beyond Tikhonovka. There, in the middle of the cemetery, were common graves in which two hundred reposed peasants a day had been buried, who had died from hunger and sickness. They had been buried without funerals, without mounds, without crosses. The Elder, after seeing and hearing about it, said, ‘Here, day and night, over these common graves of the martyrs, there burn candles from earth to heaven.’ And Fr Sebastian was an intercessor for them all. [12]

When St Sebastian’s community was petitioning the authorities for the opening of the church in Mikhailovka, Torstensen tells us, ‘The parents of soldiers who had died during the Second World War wrote to the military commander of the Karaganda Province that their sole consolation was to pray for their sons who had died in the war. “But,” one letter said, “they deprive us even of this possibility.”’ [13] When the church finally was opened, we read of St Sebastian:

He especially loved memorial services celebrated according to the monastery custom he had inherited—he zealously served Pannikhidas daily, and continued celebrating funeral services until the end of his life. He said that he liked to commemorate and serve funerals for women more because among women there were far fewer sins. To him all the sins of people were visible. [14]

But St Sebastian did not neglect the living either. According to Torstensen, ‘The Elder expended much labor for the nurturing of his flock. . . . The lives of these people were models of virtue. They were called the “Batiushka-ites”. . . . It was said that a good half of Mikhailovka was like a secret monastery in the world.’ [15] In addition, apart from the people immediately around him in Mikhailovka, St Sebastian would travel to other settlements to minister to the faithful there as well. Of these, he especially loved the distant community at Melkombinat, where there was a grain-milling factory. ‘He would say that in Mikhailovka he had his “Optina”, and in Melkombinat he had his “Skete”. He gathered his orphans and widows there, bought them a house and became their guardian. . . . A spirit of peace reigned here.’ [16]

Torstensen relates from her own experience what it was like to live in obedience to the Elder:

For thirteen and a half years I was Elder Sebastian’s spiritual daughter. This happiness cannot be compared with anything. There was such total protection in everything, such love. No matter what would happen, if you would only manage to run to him and succeed in informing him, he would take everything away and right every wrong. He would even prolong one’s life. As he once told me, or, to be more precise, as he once spilled out during a frank conversation, ‘How many lives I’ve prolonged.’ [17]

During Great Lent of 1966, St Sebastian’s health declined rapidly, a process Torstensen relates in minute detail in a diary she kept daily during those weeks. He fell asleep in the Lord on Tuesday, 6 April on the Church’s calendar, on Radonitsa. In the words of Tatiana Torstensen:

The earthly path of his half century of pastoral care and twenty-two years of guidance of eldership was completed in the church in Mikhailovka in the city of Karaganda, whose cemetery will always be famous, and where a white marble cross shines over the grave of Elder Sebastian. The sacred podvig of the blessed Elder, who had acquired great gifts of grace from the Lord, was now completed. His service to God, through upholding the good in mankind for the salvation of souls, had come to its end, and his superb example of holy spiritual love was concluded—‘his fruit is unto holiness and the end everlasting life’ (Rom. 6:22).

Fr Sebastian often spoke of eternal life and the kingdom of God, and this found its expression through a certain concept of his—the ‘Great Family’. Once, not long before his death (I did not note the date), to my words, ‘Batiushka, stay alive with us,’ he replied, ‘They’re already waiting for me there.’ [18]

The volume on St Sebastian compiled by Vera Koroleva, which includes Torstensen’s biography, also contains numerous accounts of his miracles by various spiritual children. Here, as just a tiny sample, are two stories related by Monk Sebastian (Khmyrov):

One day I came to church in the evening, when suddenly during the service I was seized by a fever and my nose began to feel very painful. I decided to wait for the anointing and then leave—I felt that bad. I stepped up to be anointed, and Fr Sebastian anointed me and touched my nose as if by accident. It was so painful! I was walking towards the exit and felt that I was getting better, and I understood that he had sensed my illness and had healed me.

Once he invited my sixteen-year-old daughter Lyuba, my eldest, to see him in his cell. He spoke with her, and during their conversation he was suddenly transfigured—he became young, beardless, and bright as an angel, and the whole cell was covered by an unusual light. In this manner the Lord revealed the spiritual greatness and purity of the Elder, even while he was still alive. [19]

Koroleva also has a section of various teachings of the Elder, as well as one of selections from his sermons. From the first section:

He repeatedly said, ‘If you fail to observe the fasts without a good reason, the time will come when you’ll be overtaken by sickness. Then you’ll fast against your will. The Lord will allow this because of sins.’

He would speak with pity of those who rarely came to church and who rarely if ever received Communion (especially the elderly). As an example, he would point out those who lived next door to the church: ‘They sit on the bench during the whole service but don’t come to church, even though they call themselves Christians! And other people who live in distant places, even many miles away from the church, find time, for the sake of the salvation of their souls, to come to church on feast days to pray.’ . . . [20]

And here are a couple of brief paragraphs from the ‘Selections from Sermons’:

Sermon on the Repentant Sinner
(January 18/31, 1960)

Sinner, abandon your passions and sinful habits. Heaven, with more than ninety-nine righteous ones is calling you! The angels in heaven rejoice over a single repentant sinner. Heaven is seeking your salvation. Only repent and be converted, and break yourself of sin.

For your sake the Lord Himself was born in a manger of dumb beasts and suffered. He was insulted, spat upon, crowned with thorns, and was nailed to the Cross by the hand of his own creation. He suffered and died so as afterwards to be glorified and exalted. But you, O man, what can you be proud of? What do you possess that is truly yours, which is fit for eternity? You won’t take your riches with you, and honor, glory, and health are temporal. Let us enrich ourselves for the future, and gather our wealth there through beggards, the poor, and the sick. You are a citizen of heaven, so why are you glued ot the earth?! You are an heir of the Kingdom of Heaven and you possess an immortal soul, which the Only-begotten Son Himself redeemed by His death upon the Cross. [21]

In conclusion, here are the Troparion and Kontakion of the Saint:

Troparion, Tone 3

O servant of the Holy Trinity, * earthly angel and heavenly man, * successor of the spiritual eldership of Optina, * initiate of the mysteries of Christ and confessor, * all-honorable abode of the Holy Spirit, * holy and venerable Father Sebastian, * ask for the world peace, * and for our souls great mercy.

Kontakion, Tone 3

Let us glorify, O ye faithful * him who hath entered into the joy of the Risen Lord, * the fellow-member of the choir of the Elders of Optina, * sharer in the lot of the martyrs and confessors, * co-celebrant with the initiates of God’s mysteries, * earthly angel and heavenly man, * godly adornment of the city of Karaganda, * exceeding great intercessor for the land of Kazakhstan, * praise of the Church of Russia, * and let us cry out to him with gladness: * Rejoice O our all-honored and venerable Sebastian. [22]

[1] Tatiana V. Torstensen, Elder Sebastian of Optina, ed. Vera Koroleva, tr. David Koubek (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1999), p. 174.

[2] Ibid., p. 33.

[3] Ibid., p. 54.

[4] Ibid., p. 21.

[5] Ibid., p. 26.

[6] Ibid., p. 32.

[7] Ibid., p. 72.

[8] Ibid., p. 43.

[9] Ibid., pp. 57-8.

[10] Ibid., p. 70.

[11] Qtd. in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, tr. Wlad Godzich, Vol. 13 of Theory & History of Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1994), p. 4.

[12] Torstensen, pp. 56-7.

[13] Ibid., p. 53.

[14] Ibid., p. 71.

[15] Ibid., p. 75.

[16] Ibid., p. 76.

[17] Ibid., p. 78.

[18] Ibid., pp. 162-3.

[19] Ibid., p. 240.

[20] Ibid., p. 350.

[21] Ibid., p. 373.

[22] Ibid., p. 448.

Orthodoxy in Poland & Vice Versa

I’ve noticed for some time that I get a large number of visits to my blog from Poland. Now, I know very little about Poland, and to my knowledge have never posted anything directly relevant to that country. But these visits have me thinking about it, and I’d like to mention two things in honour of my Polish reader(s).

The first is the Prawosławny Monaster Św. Cyryla i Metodego (Orthodox Monastery of Ss Cyril and Methodius) in Ujkowice, Poland, founded by two brothers according to the flesh who had been monks at the RC Czestochowa monastery, Fathers Nikodim and Atanazy. The brothers had become dissatisfied with the Latin rite, and were confirmed in their desire to start an Eastern rite monastery by a dream they had about a Catholic saint of Poland. According to this account on the Orthodox England page (where I first heard of the monastery), shortly after settling on a property near Przermysl and the Ukrainian border the brothers received an incredible confirmation of their decision:

One day in late autumn, two women passing by on the road stopped before the chapel and, making the sign of the cross, began to pray. They prayed and wept. When the monks made their acquaintance, one of the women explained:

‘My father, Mikolaj Kania, died a long time ago, but as long as he lived here, he used to say, “Here in this place, the Mother of God will appear. There will be a monastery here.”’

This woman donated three acres of land to the monastery.

Unfortunately, the fathers had to face many temptations, including fierce opposition to the monastery from many of the local people. The RC Curia tried to shut them down, people protested their presence, their was an attempt to prosecute them for building a wall, and their supplies were stolen or damaged.

But along with the obstacles, the monks also received encouragement.

‘We were in Kalnikow for the celebration of the one thousandth anniversary of the Baptism of Rus’, recalls Fr Nikodim. ‘Bishop Adam of the Polish Orthodox Church was there. We were in need of encouragement, and he gave it to us’.

‘You have already won’, the bishop told them, ‘just by persevering and staying on in that place. But remember, don't accuse the people; they are the least guilty. Someone entirely different is behind it’.

‘These were beautiful words’, recalls Fr. Nikodim. ‘To this day I bear no resentment towards the people who caused us so much harm. I can shake hands with each of them, because I know that my enemy is not material man, but immaterial spirit - the Evil One. He knows perfectly well what the role of this monastery is to be, and he wants to prevent it’. Indeed, he explains, ‘a monastery is like a spring from which the grace of God and love flows, purifying people and changing them. That, in fact, has been our experience. The people here are different from what they were in 1986 when we first came’.

In December of 1993, the fathers asked to be received into the Orthodox Church, and in June of 1994 their monastery became fully Orthodox. According to Fr Nikodim:

Orthodox Christianity is indigenous to Poland. SS Cyril and Methodius arrived here before the Western Schism of 1054. There was only one Christendom, and it has survived down to our own day in the form of the Orthodox Church. Clearly, Orthodoxy is not alien to Poland, it was not brought by any tsar, it is our own. It has shaped the Polish state since its inception, for about twelve hundred years. Orthodoxy in this land is native, like the Vistula and San rivers, which flow through the country, watering the soil, and making it fertile. You can't ignore this river, and you can't dam it up because sooner or later the dam will break, such is the nature of the river.

Today the monastery is almost entirely self-sufficient, and the monks reverently treasure a miracle-working Vatopaidi icon of the Mother of God. It is interesting to note that the monastery was founded exactly two hundred years to the month after the last Orthodox monastery in the region was destroyed by Austrian artillery in July 1786. Here is a wonderful photo of the brotherhood, and one can see lots of other pictures here.

The second story of Polish interest I’ve come across is in Leonard Stanton’s fascinating book, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky, Godol, Tolstoy, and Others (NY: Peter Lang, 1995), to which I have already referred once or twice on this blog. On p. 70, Stanton notes:

Since the publication of Soloukhin’s essay [Vladimir Soloukhin, Время собирать камни (Moscow: Sovremennaia Moskva, 1980)], it is no long necessary for writers in the USSR to tiptoe around the ‘nameless stages’ in Optina’s history under the Soviets. They turned it into a prison camp. Approximately five thousand prisoners, Polish officers who would be shot in the Katyn Forest Massacre in the late spring of 1940, were held at the former monastery between November 1939 and April 1940.

Then, later on (p. 259), Stanton writes:

Optina is a curious monument. Although it is a place, its special character does not seem especially spatial. Its ironies are too deep and painful. The ground on which Elder Amvrosii consoled a grieving Dostoevsky was the same on which the decimated portion of an entire generation of Poland’s intelligentsia awaited massacre. No, Optina is more properly a monument in time and memory.

It is unfortunate that the heinousness of this crime is so easily lost amid the vast multitude of Stalin’s depraved murders. I only hope that at Optina, in their Gethsemane vigil, these brave Polish men received some consolation through the grace that had sanctified that place.

'Can You Describe This?'—Akhmatova on Stalin's Terror

The epigraph to The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, An Experiment in Literary Investigation: I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney [NY: Harper, 1974], p. v) reads:

I dedicate this
to all those who did not live
to tell it.
And may they please forgive me
for not having seen it all
nor remembered it all,
for not having divined all of it.

Re-reading this now, I am reminded of the ‘Instead of a Preface’ to Anna Akhmatova’s lament for Stalin’s victims, ‘Requiem’ (Anna Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova, ed. and trans. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward [Boston: Mariner, 1973], p. 99):

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror [1937-8] I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):

‘Can you describe this?’

And I said: ‘I can.’

Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

I recalled this passage, inexplicably, in church the other day, causing tears to fall immediately from my eyes. The entire poem is quite powerful.

Concerning Akhmatova, Solomon Volkov has been quoted as saying (Tomas Venclova, ‘A Meeting of Two Poets: Joseph Brodsky’s “Nunc Dimittis”’, pp. 7-8):

And with Akhmatova, if you’d never heard anything about Christianity, then you found out about it from her, by associating with her. This was a human influence more than anything else. You understand that you’re dealing with homo sapiens, that is, not so much with ‘sapiens’ as with ‘dei’.

Leonard Stanton speculates that Akhmatova may have visited St Nektary of Optina in 1925 or 1926 (The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Others [NY: Peter Lang, 1995], p. 254). The photo above shows a young Akhmatova c. 1914 with her husband, Nikolai Gumilev, and son, Lev, who was imprisoned in 1935. The latter spent nearly twenty years, except for a stint fighting in WWII, in and out of prison, and much of 'Requiem' describes Akhmatova's fear and anguish for him.

More on Hieromartyr Benjamin of Petrograd & Solzhenitsyn

In my post on the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, I mentioned my particular devotion to the New Martyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, who was executed on the night of 12/25 to 13/26 August 1922. At the time I didn’t have my copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, in which I first learned of this holy Martyr, but I have recently recovered it. There, Solzhenitsyn points out that St Benjamin was the first elected Metropolitan ‘since the days of ancient Novgorod the Great’, and describes him briefly, ‘A gentle, simple, easily accessible man, a frequent visitor in factories and mills, popular with the people and with the lower clergy’ (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, An Experiment in Literary Investigation: I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney [NY: Harper, 1974], p. 349). Solzhenitsyn recounts some of the show trial St Benjamin received on pp. 350-2, but it is recounted in more detail here. According to this account, when told that the tribunal wanted to hear about himself, St Benjamin replied:

About myself? But what else can I tell you about myself? One more thing perhaps: regardless of what my sentence will be, no matter what you decide, life or death, I will lift up my eyes reverently to God, cross myself and affirm: 'Glory to Thee, my Lord; glory to Thee for everything.'