21 April 2010

St Sebastian of Optina on Tolstoy's Last Days, Part 2


Continued from this post.

After his departure from Optina on 29 October 1910, Tolstoy’s next stop was the women’s monastery at Shamordino, which was under the guidance of the Optina Elders and where his sister, Mother Maria, lived. According to Stanton, upon arrival Tolstoy immediately spoke to his sister about his inability to continue living at Yasnaya Polyana and his wife’s suicide attempt. Mother Maria seems to have sympathised with this, concluding that his wife was an unbalanced person. Then, according to Stanton, Tolstoy related ‘his intention to rent a small cottage near Shamordino where he could settle into a life of quiet contemplation until the end of his days’. Apparently he had been thinking about doing something like this prior to the flight as well, having written to ‘a peasant admirer’ just five days earlier asking for help finding a ‘small cottage’ in his village. [1] Stanton speculates that Tolstoy may have been trying to get away from both his wife and his ‘followers’, both of whom were vieing for control over him and his wealth. Stanton writes:

Tolstoy’s letters and diaries reveal occasional impatience with the ‘Tolstoyans’ and in particular with the idea of Tolstoyan colonies. Could the prospect of a simple life in the shadow of Shamordino’s and Optina’s walls have held forth the hope of liberation from the clutches of both of the camps that competed for his love and allegiance? [2]

The evidence is inconclusive, though Stanton is not persuaded that Tolstoy was seeking reconciliation with the Church at this time.

But the idea of staying at Shamordino was abandoned when Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra, a zealous disciple, arrived, ‘bringing news that raised her father’s fear that he would be pursued by his wife and possibly the police’. On the morning of 31 October, they boarded a train south, debarking that afternoon when Tolstoy became sick with fever. For an entire week, Alexandra and the other ‘Tolstoyans’ prevented anyone, including Tolstoy’s wife, from seeing him. St Barsanuphius, the skete superior at Optina, was among those who arrived (on 5 November), only to be denied access. According to Stanton:

Most commentators have portrayed Elder Varsanofii as an emissary of the Holy Synod, commissioned to receive Tolstoy back into the Church on his deathbed. This view has not been documented by any telegrams or letters from the Holy Synod to Optina. Elder Varsanofii, who died in 1912, did not leave any verifiable confirmation or denial of the Synod’s having entrusted him with any duties at Astapovo. Still, the preponderance of circumstantial evidence indicates that Varsanofii’s presence at Astapovo came to assume at least a semi-official character, whatever his original stimulus to go to Tolstoy might have been. [3]

But then Stanton continues:

It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that Varsanofii went to Astapovo in a pastoral role, rather than as a representative of the Holy Synod. Tolstoy, it could be argued, had made an overture to the Church in having visited Optina just several days past—and this without any prompting by the Synod. Nor is it difficult to entertain the possibility that someone at Astapovo, or even Mariia Nikolaevna at Shamordino, might have sent a message to Optina requesting an elder be sent. The Tolstoyans at Astapovo, and Aleksandra in particular, were genuinely concerned to shelter Tolstoy from any conversations he might have found stressful or unpleasant; that is why his wife and sons were barred until the last few minutes before his death. Moreover, the Tolstoyans clearly had an interest in preventing any reconciliation between their hero and the Orthodox Church, and they made sure that Tolstoy had no chance to give Varsanofii either a deathbed testimony of conversion or even a word of repentance. Finally, after the dust of the events had settled, it would also be in the interest of the more cynical of the Tolstoyans to obscure, if possible, the true nature of Varsanofii’s visit to Tolstoy at Astapovo, if his mission was truly pastoral. [4]

Now, apart from the debatability of the notion that St Barsanuphius was either sent by the Synod, or came out of pastoral concern, but both could not have been true simultaneously, this account is still rather incomplete. True, Stanton adds a lengthy endnote mentioning the views on the matter of Prof. Ivan M. Kontsevich, who, in Optina Pustyn’ i eia vremia, offers testimony from a couple of other sources that St Barsanuphius had been summoned by a telegram from Astapovo [presumably sent by Tolstoy himself] requesting an Elder, and that a report that the Elder was sent by the Holy Synod had been deliberately falsified. Concerning Kontsevich’s account, Stanton writes:

Although Kontsevich’s coloration of his reprise of the events at Astapovo is highly speculative, it is not altogether implausible. It is consisten with the minority view that Tolstoy’s appearance at Optina in October 1910 resulted from more than an accidental decision made in the haste of his flight. [5]

But let us now consider St Sebastian’s testimony, which because of their separation by the Iron Curtain, even Kontsevich would not likely have known. St Sebastian takes up the story after Tolstoy’s departure from Optina:

Later there was a message to the Elder [Joseph] from Tolstoy’s sister, the Nun Maria, that he had left her from Shamordino. Then from the Astapovo railroad station a telegram arrived for us concerning the illness of Leo Nikolaevich in which, in his name, the Elder was asked to come to him. Fr Barsanuphius immediately left, but those who surrounded Tolstoy would not let him see Leo Nikolaevich. Fr Barsanuphius passed a letter in to his daughter Alexandra.

He wrote to her that ‘it was, in fact, the will of your father that I come.’ All the same, they didn’t let him in. Nor would they allow Tolstoy’s wife Sofia Andreyevna. She had come in her own train-carriage and lived at the station in it. This was a very difficult experience for Fr Barsanuphius; he returned nearly ill and always became upset when he recalled it. And he said, ‘Though he was a lion [alluding to Tolstoy’s Christian name], yet he could not break the chains. It’s a pity, a great pity.’ Elder Joseph also felt deeply sorry for him.

Fr Barsanuphius said that it was not true that someone had sent him. ‘It was solely because of the desire of Leo Nikolaevich himself that I went to Astapovo,’ he affirmed. [6]

Although Mother Maria did not think Tolstoy had gone to Optina with the intention of returning to the Church, this does not mean that he didn’t either change his mind when finally facing the prospect of death, or at least desire something short of full reconciliation—perhaps even just some kind of prayer or reassurance. it seems to me that if Ss Barsanuphius and Sebastian say that there was a telegram from Astapovo, then they are to be believed over those who had motives, including mercenary ones, to lie about the issue. Prof. Kontsevich reports the testimony of Sergei Morevich, a ‘buffet attendant at Astapovo’. As Morevich apparently told it, ‘The fact of Tolstoy’s having visited Optina Pustyn and the summoning of the elder was like a bomb exploding in the Tolstoyan circle, which couldn’t withstand the blow and fell to pieces.’ [7]


[1] Leonard Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, & Others (NY: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 211.

[2] Ibid., p. 213.

[3] Ibid., pp. 213-4.

[4] Ibid., p. 214.

[5] Ibid., p. 227, n. 23.

[6] Tatiana V. Torstensen, Elder Sebastian of Optina, ed. Vera Koroleva, tr. David Koubek (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1999), pp. 79-80.

[7] Stanton, p. 227, n. 23.

20 April 2010

St Sebastian of Optina on Tolstoy's Last Days, Part 1


Until quite recently, when I began tutoring a grad student working on an independent study course on Tolstoy, I had only recalled vague circumstances of the author’s last days. I knew something about a flight from Yasnaya Polyana, something about Optina Pustyn monastery, and something about a train station, and that was about all, literally. But in the course of discussing the possibility of my student doing a paper on the Confession which would focus on death (as it turned out, this idea was largely abandoned), I reread with special attentiveness the account of Tolstoy’s last days in Leonard Stanton’s fascinating The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination. Then, while looking through the Platina translation of the life of St Sebastian the Confessor, Elder Sebastian of Optina, I was very excited to learn even more about this fascinating story. To begin with, here is a typical account, this one taken from Wikipedia (here).

Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo station in 1910 after leaving home in the middle of winter at the age of 82. His death came only days after gathering the nerve to abandon his family and wealth and take up the path of a wandering ascetic; a path that he had agonized over pursuing for decades. He had not been at the peak of health before leaving home, his wife and daughters were all actively engaged in caring for him daily. He had been speaking and writing of his own death in the days preceding his departure from home, but fell ill at the train station not far from home. The station master took Tolstoy to his apartment, where his personal doctors were called to the scene. He was given injections of morphine and camphor. The police tried to limit access to his funeral procession, but thousands of peasants lined the streets at his funeral. Still, some peasants were heard to say that, other than knowing that ‘some nobleman had died’, they knew little else about Tolstoy.

But this account leaves out so much as to seem almost deliberately misleading. Noting the statement that the great writer ‘fell ill at the train station not far from home’, one would think he had only just left and had as yet been nowhere to speak of before falling sick. But from the time of his flight to the time of his sickness—28 October to 31 October 1910—nearly four full days had lapsed. During that time, he had visited two places: Optina Pustyn and its womens’ dependency, Shamordino, where Tolstoy’s sister, Mother Maria, was living the monastic life.

According to Stanton, Tolstoy had been to Optina at least four other times, beginning in 1877, and had visited Elder Ambrose on three of those occasions. The latter said very little about their final conversation (in 1890), but told Constantine Leontiev:

‘When Tolstoy came into my cell, I blessed him, and he kissed my hand. But when he came to leave, in order to avoid a blessing, he kissed me on the cheek.’ When he was saying this, the elder was barely breathing—he was so worn out from his conversation with the Count. ‘He is very proud,’ added Father Amvrosii. [1]

While it is impossible to be sure of his plans prior to the morning of 28 October 1910, it is clear that Tolstoy had had Optina on the mind, if not as a destination, then as a sort of spiritual symbol or choice lying before him. According to Stanton:

We must wonder if thoughts of Optina prompted him to read Dostoevsky in the troubled month prior to his flight from home, or if his reading of The Brothers Karamazov turned his thoughts to Optina. Whatever the case, Tolstoy read the first part of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in October 1910. He mentioned Elder Zosima in a diary entry of 19 October, and nine days later, on the 28th, he was at Optina. On 26 October, only two days before his flight, Tolstoy had a dream in which Grushenka, Dostoevsky’s heroine, was involved in a romance with Nikolai Strakhov, the critic who had accompanied Tolstoy to Optina in 1877. [2]

Stanton concludes that the flight to Optina ‘was, if not unpredictable, made suddenly and in haste’, but that nevertheless ‘he did go to Optina, and he did so of his own free will’. At this point, Stanton gives the account of this visit:

While at Optina, Tolstoy did not visit either Iosif or Varsanofii, the two elders then in residence. Tolstoy and Dr Makovitskii [‘his follower and personal physician’] arrived at Optina in the early evening of 28 October. They were given a comfortable room at the monastery’s hostel. Tolstoy had some tea, and by eight o’clock he was making a comparatively long journal entry, describing the previous night’s disturbance, his flight, and the wearying trip to Optina. That night Tolstoy slept uneasily. He awoke on the morning of the 29th to hear news brought from Yasnaya Polyana by Chertkov’s assistant, Alyosha Sergeenko. Some of it was bad. Sofiia Andreevna [Tolstoy’s wife] had attempted suicide by drowning, and the family had given some consideration to having Tolstoy seized by the police and declared mentally incompetent by the court. Other news brought Tolstoy some comfort. Letters from [his disciple] Chertkov and [his daughter and follower] Aleksandra applauded his departure and reassured him that all was for the best.

Later in the day, Tolstoy, who walked regularly for exercise, took a stroll about Optina’s grounds, pausing here and there to exchange a few inconsequential words with some ordinary monks. He never spoke with Elder Iosif, though; he ventured up to the hermitage, lingering for a time at Iosif’s door, but he left after a discomfiting interchange with the Elder’s cell attendant.

That afternoon, the old novelist and his physician left Optina to continue their journey. Although Tolstoy expressed an intention to return to Optina, he did not live to do so. [3]

I shall take up the story after their departure in another post. For now, I’d like to relate the story of the visit to Optina from another perspective—that of St Sebastian, who claims to have been the cell attendant at the time of Tolstoy’s visit. According to St Sebastian:

When Leo Tolstoy came to the Skete on one of the last days of October, 1910, I was serving as Elder Joseph’s cell attendant [an obedience St Sebastian fulfilled from his entrance to the monastery in January of 1909 until St Joseph’s death in April of 1911]. Leo Tolstoy had arrived in Optina from Kozelsk the day before, late in the evening, and had spent the night in the monastery guesthouse. The guest master, Fr Michael, later related that, after tea, Tolstoy had questioned him about the Elders and asked which of them was receiving people, and if Elder Joseph might receive him, saying that he had come to visit and have a chat with the Elders. [4]

Torstensen then relates the testimony of the guestmaster, Fr Michael:

They came—there were two of them. They knocked. I opened the door. Leo Nikolaevich asked, ‘May I enter?’

I said, ‘Please do.’

But he said, ‘Perhaps it’s not possible for me; I’m Tolstoy.’

‘Why not?’ I said, ‘we’re happy to receive everyone who has a desire to see us.’

Then he said, ‘Well, greetings, brother.’

I answered, ‘Greetings, your Excellency.’

He said, ‘You weren’t offended that I called you brother? All men are brothers.’

I replied, ‘Not in the least; and it’s true that all are brothers.’

Well, that’s how things stood between us. I conducted him into the best room. Early in the morning I sent an assistant to the skete Superior, Fr Barsanuphius, to warn him that Tolstoy was coming to the Skete to see him. [5]

At this point, Torstensen returns to St Sebastian’s testimony:

Elder Joseph was ill, and I was sitting beside him. Elder Barsanuphius called on us and related that Fr Michael had sent to warn him that Tolstoy was coming to see him. Elder Barsanuphius said, ‘I asked him, “Who told you?” and he replied that Tolstoy himself had said so.’

Hearing this, Elder Joseph said, ‘If he comes, we’ll receive him with affection, respect and joy, even though he’s been excommunicated. This time he came on his own—no one indeed forced him to come, otherwise we couldn’t receive him.’ Then they sent me to look outside the skete enclosure. I saw Leo Nikolaevich and reported to the Elders that he was walking close alongside the house, at first approaching, then stepping back.

Elder Joseph said, ‘It’s hard for him. He’s surely come to us for living water. Go and invite him in, if he’s come to see us. Go ask him.’ I went out, but he was no longer there; he had left. He could only have just gone off but, after all, he would have been on a horse, so I couldn’t have caught up with him. . . . [6]

And so the final visit to Optina ended. From his words to Fr Michael about having ‘a chat with the Elders’, it does not sound as though Tolstoy was quite ready to reconcile with the Church. But that he wanted to speak with them seems significant, and that he did not seems a great tragedy. Based on St Sebastian’s testimony, it does not seem likely that Tolstoy really did have ‘a discomfiting interchange with the Elder’s cell attendant’, since according to St Sebastian he didn’t speak with him at all. One wonders if this supposed ‘cell attendant’ was simply some other monk who recognised Tolstoy and disapproved of his being there.

But the entire story is not quite done. I shall tell the rest—continuing to place Stanton’s and St Sebastian’s accounts in juxtaposition—in a subsequent post or posts.

Continued here.


[1] Qtd. in Leonard Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, & Others (NY: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 206.

[2] Ibid., p. 210.

[3] Ibid., pp. 210-1.

[4] Tatiana V. Torstensen, Elder Sebastian of Optina, ed. Vera Koroleva, tr. David Koubek (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1999), p. 78.

[5] Ibid., pp. 78-9.

[6] Ibid., p. 79.

19 April 2010

'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.

18 April 2010

'We Long for Your Church'—Saints of Thessaloniki


Today, the Third Sunday of Pascha, besides the well-known commemoration of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, the great city of Thessaloniki also commemorates the Synaxis of her many Saints. Among these, she counts first of all the holy Apostle Paul, who exhorted the Thessalonians to ‘stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle’ (II Thess. 2:15). But immediately after St Paul comes Thessaloniki’s Great Martyr, St Demetrius the Myrrh-gusher, whose relics continue to pour forth miracles even to this day. Perhaps next in fame are the great Apostles to the Slavs, Ss Cyril and Methodius, to whom all Slavs are eternally indebted for bringing them the Gospel in their own language. Finally, we must not neglect to note the great Archbishop, St Gregory Palamas, who so courageously defended the Faith against the heresies of Barlaam and Akindynos. But these five are only the most renowned of a multitude of cœlestial luminaries standing before the throne of God in intercession for Thessaloniki. As Sophia Ahtaridis writes:

Thus, this city justifies the boast of the Apostle Paul when he wrote in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians: ‘We are bound to thank God always for you, brethren, as it is meet, because that your faith groweth exceedingly, and the charity of every one of you all toward each other aboundeth; so that we ourselves boast of you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all the persecutions and tribulations that ye endure’ (1:3-4). [1]

In his fascinating book on Ss Cyril and Methodius, Professor Emeritus Anthony-Emil N. Tachiaos of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki writes:

Apart from bathing in the fount of Greek education at the houses of their teachers, Drungarius Leo’s remarkable children also acquired further knowledge from their life in the ‘Thessalonians’ great and noteworthy city, protected by God’, where they gradually became acquainted with the burning issues of the Empire. Thessalonica was a school in itself—the Empire’s second city after Constantinople, with the marks of each historical epoch deeply etched upon its face. Thessalonica was Byzantium’s gateway to the West, the Empire’s eye, which was firmly fixed upon the ‘Western regions’—that is, the vast expanse of its dominions extending from the Macedonian capital to Sirmium and Dalmatia, or in other words the whole of Illyricum. Thessalonica stood upon the road which linked ancient Rome with the new Rome, Constantinople, and indeed, until 732 the city came under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Rome itself. Within its walls profound deposits and traditions had been laid down and survived at successive notional levels. Beginning at the time of the illustrious Macedonian Kings, and continuing on through the Hellenistic and Roman eras, they passed on to subsequent generations Greek and Latin memories and wisdom, which were all fused together by a common catalyst, the Greek Christian tradition. Their enduring symbols, the city’s magnificent monuments bore living witness to these traditions. All this, together with the contemporary historical events that were being acted out in the broader environs of the city, formed another kind of school for Constantine [St Cyril] and Methodius. [2]

As a resident of this God-protected city for two years, this commemoration of her Saints has special meaning for me. It was one of my great pleasures to walk up and down the streets of Thessaloniki, stopping at her many churches, old and new, [3] to venerate the relics of her Saints—St Demetrius, St Gregory Palamas, St Theodora, St David, St Basil the Confessor, and others—and to encounter there the pious clergy, monastics, and simple faithful, many of them perhaps modern Saints in their own right. Profoundly moved by these experiences, I wrote the following poem (dated 15 February 2002), which stands as my humble attempt at a tribute to the heavenly beauties of this city:

Salonika

Encircled by ancient walls,
On the slope of a hill by the sea you lie,
Your dazzling churches and ruined mosques
Sleeping in a garden of our vain edifices.
You’ve stood firm, lady,
Since the days of Philip and Alexander,
Since your Apostle’s letters,
Since your emperor’s palace,
Through invasions of Avars and Bulgars
And your fall to the Turk,
Since the welcoming of Abraham’s children
And the horrors of your occupation.
And even now the ghosts of your Roman splendour
Haunt your little old streets,
Hallowed by centuries of faith,
And the uncreated light of a spiritual aristocracy
Gleams in the eyes of your merchants,
And you live still
Under your martyred Patron’s spear
And your holy Archbishop’s prayers.

In conclusion, here are two troparia from an Old Church Slavonic canon for St Demetrius believed to have been written by St Methodius, Equal-to-the-Apostles. As Thomas Butler notes, ‘The poet is evidently a native of Thessaloniki. He is homesick for his city, as he recalls its annual celebration of Demetrius’s feast day, October 26.’ [4]

Hear now your poor supplicants, O glorious one, and heed our prayers, as we have become separated far from your radiant shrine, and our hearts burn within us as we long for your church, holy one—to worship there again some day through your prayers.

Why, O wise one, should we—your miserable slaves—alone be deprived of your beauty, travelling through foreign lands and towns for the love of the Creator, blessed one, warriors for the humiliation of the cruel trilinguals and heretics? [5]

(The painting of Byzantine Thessaloniki is the work of Thanasis Bakogiorgos, who to my knowledge still runs his beautiful shop, Porphyra, near the Plateia Navarino. Incidentally, on the right side of the centre wall, just opposite the large domed church of St George’s Rotunda, is where the modern Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is.)


[1] Sophia Ahtaridis, Foreword, Byzantine Monuments of Thessaloniki, by Constantine Cavarnos (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, 1995), p. x.

[2] Anthony-Emil N. Tachiaos, Cyril & Methodius of Thessalonica: The Acculturation of the Slavs (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2001), p. 6.

[3] Constantine Cavarnos notes, ‘Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece from the point of view of size and importance as an administrative and cultural center, is the most glorious one from the standpoint of Byzantine monuments. It boasts of more than a dozen beautiful, awe-inspiring Byzantine churches’ (Cavarnos, p. 19).

[4] Thomas Butler, Monumenta Bulgarica: A Bilingual Anthology of Bulgarian Texts from the 9th to the 19th Centuries (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic, 2004), p. 31.

[5] Ibid., p. 41.

17 April 2010

'Theologian & Collector of Oddments'—St Isidore of Seville


Today, 4 April on the Church’s calendar, we celebrate the memory of St Isidore (c. 560-636), Archbishop of Seville. An article on the Orthodox Saints of Spain (here) notes that he was ‘venerated as a miracle-worker’ in his lifetime. In Dante’s Paradiso X, the ‘flame’ of St Isidore is pointed out by Thomas Aquinas in the fourth circle, that of the sun, among ‘the ardent souls’ renowned for wisdom [1] and Anthony Esolen calls him a ‘theologian and collector of oddments of knowledge and folklore, whose Sentences and Etymologies enjoyed wide repute in the Middle Ages’. [2] According to Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, St Isidore was ‘a gifted student and writer known for his generous almsgiving’, and as a bishop was ‘an able administrator’. [3] Here is the account of St Isidore’s life from the Oxford Dictionary of Saints:

Born at Seville of a noble family from Cartagena, Isidore was educated mainly by his brother Leander, a monk, but did not become one himself. From this monastic formation he acquired and communicated an encyclopedia knowledge in his books, which became most influential in medieval clerical and monastic education. His importance as archbishop was also considerable. He ruled for thirty-six years, succeeding his brother Leander, and energetically completing his work of converting the Visigoths from Arianism and organizing the Church in Spain through synods and councils. The most notable were the councils of Seville (619) and Toledo (633), over both of which he presided in person; one of their achievements was the decree (centuries before Charlemagne’s similar one) that a cathedral school should be established in every diocese. Besides being a successful and influential educator, Isidore completed the Mozarabic missal and breviary and was notable for his abundant charity to the poor. Soon before his death, he had himself clothed in sackcloth and ashes. . . .

His reputation is due principally to his writings. Bede, at the time of his death, was working on a translation of extracts from Isidore’s book On the Wonders of Nature (De natura rerum), [4] but the Etymologies is his most famous work. This is a kind of encyclopedia which contains elements of grammar, rhetoric, theology, history, mathematics, and medicine, presented in the form of etymologies, which are in fact often erroneous. His Chronica Majora, which covers the years from the Creation to 615, is an influential compilation from various other church historians, but with special information on Spanish history. Other works include biographies of famous men (completing Jerome’s work), a summary of Christian doctrine, rules for monks and nuns, and the History of the Goths. From the time of Bede onwards the writings of Isidore figure in medieval library lists almost as frequently as those of Gregory the Great, with whom he shares the unofficial title of ‘Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages’. [5]

A glance at the Catholic Encyclopedia (here) reveals that Farmer’s statement that St Isidore was educated by his brother, while true, is slightly misleading. J.B. O’Connor’s article notes that he ‘received his elementary education in the Cathedral school of Seville’ where ‘the trivium and quadrivium were taught by a body of learned men, among whom was the archbishop, Leander’—his brother. (O’Connor also tells us that St Isidore had ‘mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew’.)

Concerning St Isidore’s most famous book, the Etymologies, the full title of which is Originum seu Etymologiarum libri XX, Frederick Copleston tells us:

In this work Isidore deals with the seven liberal arts, as also with a great number of scientific or quasi-scientific facts and theories on subjects from Scripture and jurisprudence and medicine to achritecture, agriculture, war, navigation, and so on. He shows his conviction about the divine origin of sovereignty and the paramount authority of morality, law and justice in civil society, even in regard to the conduct and acts of the monarch. [6]

The other Frederick, Artz, gives us a very detailed outline of the work in his Mind of the Middle Ages:

Books I through III are devoted to the seven liberal arts; Book IV is on medicine, V on law and on divisions of time, VI on the Bible and church services, VII concerns God, angels, and saints, VIII the church and sects, IX languages, reces, kingdoms, armies, X is a miscellaneous etymological word list, XI concerns men and fabulous monsters, XII animals, XIII the universe, XIV the earth and its parts, XV buildings and lands, XVI stones, minerals, and metals, XVII agriculture and botany, XVIII wars and games, XIX ships, building materials, dress, and, finally, XX food, drink and furniture. [7]

C.S. Lewis considers the Etymologies an important part of the background of mediæval and Renaissance literature—indeed, St Isidore is a perfect illustration of Lewis’s observation that ‘Distinction, definition, tabulation’ were the ‘delight’ of mediæval man [8]—but rather downplays St Isidore’s achievement a little unkindly:

As the title implies his ostensible subject was language, but the frontier between explaining the meaning of words and describing the nature of things is easily violated. He makes hardly any effort to keep on the linguistic side of it, and his book thus becomes an encyclopaedia. It is a work of very mediocre intelligence, but often gives us scraps of information we cannot easily runt to ground in better authors. [9]

Similarly, Artz notes, ‘The spell of words on Isidore is strong; he strings them along and one wonders how much he understood some of his own vocabulary.’ But overall Artz is a bit more positive in his assessment, noting what an ‘enormous task’ such a book must have been considering the availability of books in 7th-c. Spain, and concluding, ‘It remained, however, until Vincent of Beauvais composed his Speculum in the thirteenth century, the most accessible book in which one could find information about many subjects—a sort of “old lumber room in which had been stored away many of the cast off clothes of antiquity”.’ [10]

To turn our attention to St Isidore’s other works, De natura rerum, ‘On the Nature of Things’, is ‘a synthesis in forty-eight chapters of the wisdom of his age about time (days, night, weeks, months and years), cosmology (earth, sky, planets, water, sun, moon and stars), climate, plague and one or two other natural phenomena’. [11] Copleston mentions two others as well—the Libri tres sententiarum, ‘a collection of theological and moral theses taken from St Augustine and St Gregory the Great’, and a ‘treatise on numbers, Liber Numerorum, which treats of the numbers occurring in the Sacred Scriptures’ and ‘is often fanciful in the extreme in the mystical meanings which it attaches to numbers.’ [12]

Clancy and Márkus note the presence of both the Etymologies and the De natura in the library of Iona monastery. They write, ‘His numerous writings were seized on with delight by Irish writers, and exercised an immediate and lasting influence. . . . The Irish were fascinated by Isidore’s works on nature . . . .’ [13]

In conclusion, I would just point out that after writing all of the above, I discovered online (here) a pdf of an entire book on St Isidore: Ernest Brehaut’s An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville. Brehaut writes:

His many writings, and especially his great encyclopedia, the Etymologies, are among the most important sources for the history of intellectual culture in the early middle ages, since in them are gathered together and summed up all such dead remnants of secular learning as had not been absolutely rejected by the superstition of his own and earlier ages; they furnish, so to speak, a cross-section of the debris of scientific thought at the point where it is most artificial and unreal. [14]

Here, finally, is part of the chapter on angels in Book VII of St Isidore’s Etymologies, as extracted in Brehaut’s book:

Chapter 5. On angels.

2. The word angel is the name of a function, not of a nature, for they are always spirits, but are called angels when they are sent.

3. And the license of painters makes wings for them in order to denote their swift passage in every direction, just as also in the fables of the poets the winds are said to have wings on account of their velocity . . . .

4. The sacred writings testify that there are nine orders of angels, namely, angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, virtues, principalities, powers, cherubim and seraphim. And we shall explain by derivation why the names of these functions were so applied.

5. Angels are so called because they are sent down from heaven to carry messages to men. . . .

6. Archangels in the Greek tongue means summi nuntii in the Latin. For they who carry small or trifling messages are called angels; and they who announce the most important things are called archangels. . . . Archangels are so called because they hold the leadership among angels. . . . For they are leaders and chiefs under whose control services are assigned to each and every angel.

17. Certain functions of angels by which signs and wonders are done in the world are called virtues, on account of which the virtues are named.

18. Those are powers to whom hostile virtues are subject, and they are called by the name of powers because evil spirits are constrained by their power not to harm the world as much as they desire.

19. Principalities are those who are in command of the hosts of the angles. And they have received the name of principality because they send the subordinate angles here and there to do the divine service. . . .

20. Dominions are they who are in charge even of the virtues and principalities, and they are called dominions because they rule the rest of the hosts of the angels.

21. Thrones are the hosts of angels who in the Latin are called sedes; and they are called thrones because the creator presides over them, and through them accomplishes his decisions.

22. Cherubim . . . are the higher hosts of angels who, being placed nearer, are fuller of the divine wisdom than the rest. . . .

24. The seraphim in like manner are a multitude of angels, and the word is translated from the Hebrew into the Latin as ardentes or incendentes, and they are called ardentes because between them and God no other angels stand, and therefore the nearer they stand in his presence the more they are lighted by the brightness of divine light.

25. And they veil the fact and feet of God sitting on his throne, and therefore the rest of the throng of angels are not able to see fully the essence of God, since the seraphim cover him.

28. To each and every one, as has been said before, his proper duties are appointed, and it is agreed that they obtained these according to merit at the beginning of the world. That angels have charge over both places and men, an angel testifies through the prophet, saying: ‘Princeps regni Persarum mihi restitit’ (Dan. x. 13).

29. Whence it is evident that there is no place that angels have not charge of. They have charge also over the beginnings of all works.

30. Such is the order or classification of the angels who after the fall of the wicked stood in celestial strength. For after the apostate angels fell, these were established in the continuance of eternal blessedness.

32. As to the two seraphim that are read of in Isaiah, they show in a figure the meaning of the Old and New Testament. But as to their covering the face and feet of God, it is because we cannot know the past before the universe, nor the future after the universe, but according to their testimony we contemplate only the intervening time. [15]


[1] Dante Alighieri, Paradise, tr. Anthony Esolen, illust. Gustave Dore (NY: Modern Library, 2007), p. 107.

[2] Dante, p. 428, and n. to p. 107, l. 131.

[3] Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, OP, Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U, 1995), p. 220.

[4] This strikes me as a poor rendering of the Latin title, and is not followed in any of the other sources I consulted. In Studies in Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2002), C.S. Lewis points out that De Natura Rerum is a whole genre of ancient writing. He writes, ‘In the fifth century we have that [philosophical poem] of Empedocles About the Phusis tôn ontôn (the Phusis of the things that are)’ (p. 35). On the next page, he notes Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, and then speculates:

Both could mean ‘What things are like’, and both would be simply two more instances of phusis and natura in the sense of ‘character, sort’. . . . Men begin by asking what this or that thing is like, asking for its phusis. They then get the idea of asking what ‘everything’ or ‘the whole show’ is like. The answer will give the phusis of everything. (p. 36)

Certainly Lewis calls our usual sense of ‘nature’, ‘the natural world’, which the translation given in Farmer is apt to imply, ‘of all the senses of all the words treated in these pages . . . the most dangerous, the one we are readiest to intrude where it is not required’ (p. 37).

[5] David Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford U, 2004), p. 264.

[6] Frederick Copleston, SJ, Mediæval Philosophy, Part I: Augustine & Bonaventure, Vol. 2 of A History of Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Image, 1962), p. 120.

[7] Frederick Artz, The Mind of the Middle Ages: An Historical Survey, AD 200-1500, 3rd rev. ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1980), p. 193.

[8] C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval & Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2002), p. 10.

[9] Ibid., pp. 90-1.

[10] Artz, p. 193.

[11] Clancy & Márkus, p. 221.

[12] Copleston, p. 120.

[13] Clancy & Márkus, pp. 220, 221.

[14] Ernest Brehaut, An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville (NY: Columbia U, 1912), p. 8. My page numbering follows that of the pdf of Brehaut, which seems to differ from that of the printed edition.

[15] Ibid., pp. 123-4.

16 April 2010

'That Brilliant Young Star'—George Herbert


A recent and brilliant post by Felix Culpa analysing the poem ‘Church-monuments’ by the dear English poet George Herbert made me realise I had been forced to skip posting on his birthday because of the coincidence this year of that day with Holy Saturday. It is a shame, because Herbert approaches more closely to sanctity than almost any of the writers I plan to post on, he is one of my own favourite poets, and as Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna has written, Herbert is ‘a genius who is too often ignored today’. [1] So while it is rather late, here is a modest post on George Herbert, whom Alexander Witherspoon and Frank Warnke call ‘a towering figure in Baroque poetry and . . . perhaps the finest devotional poet in our language’, [2] and Charles Williams ‘that brilliant young star, the Public Orator of Cambridge, Mr George Herbert, who (in a sedate Anglican manner) renounced the world for God’. [3] To begin with, I offer Dame Helen Gardner’s brief biographical note on the poet in her Penguin Classics anthology, The Metaphysical Poets:

George Herbert, 1593-1633 (p. 20). [Born in Montgomery, Wales,] George Herbert was the fifth son of Richard and Magdalen Herbert and was only three years old when his father died. He was brought up wholly by his mother, who did not marry her second husband, Sir John Danvers, until 1609. Herbert was educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected Fellow before taking his MA in 1616. He was made Reader in Rhetoric in 1618 and was Public Orator from 1620 to 1627. Like Donne, Herbert looked towards the Court and it was only with the death of his ‘Court hopes’ that he decided to ‘lose himself in an humble way’ and take Orders, an unusual step for a man of family at this period. He was ordained deacon some time in 1626 and spent the next years in retirement. In April 1630 he was presented with the living of Bemerton, near Salisbury, and was ordained priest in September. Less than three years after, he died. Herbert wrote no secular verse; in his first year at Cambridge he sent two sonnets to his mother, promising to consecrate his ‘poor Abilities in Poetry’ to God’s glory. The Temple was published a few months after his death and was constantly reprinted through the century. Walton’s Life of Herbert (1670) was not based on personal acquaintance but on good hearsay. [4]

It may not, however, be quite clear from the above how well educated Herbert was, a point that deserves note because of how often the poet’s ‘simplicity’ is insisted upon. Isaac Walton’s Life of Mr George Herbert insists that he ‘was blest with a high fancy, a civil and sharp wit, and with a natural elegance, both in his behaviour, his tongue, and his pen’, [5] but also ‘well instructed in the rules of grammar’, and that ‘he came to be perfect in the learned languages, and especially in the Greek tongue, in which he after proved an excellent critic.’ [6] In fact, we still possess a number of pieces that he composed in ‘the learned languages’, frequent speeches in Latin having been one of the requirements of the Public Orator position at Cambridge. In the words of Walton, ‘And in Cambridge we may find our George Herbert’s behaviour to be such that we may conclude he consecrated the first-fruits of his early age to virtue and a serious study of learning.’ [7] No less than in his poetry, this virtue and learning are thus on (modest) display in Herbert’s other writings: The Country Parson, his Character, & Rule of Holy Life, his letters, Brief Notes on Valdesso’s Considerations, and his orations.

But of course, Herbert is also a Christian of a very high sort (indeed, I understand he is venerated as a Saint by some Anglicans!). Speaking of how many of his favourite writers and poets even as a young atheist were thoroughly imbued with Christianity, C.S. Lewis has written:

Most alarming of all was George Herbert. Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment, but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it all directly, insisted on mediating it through what I still would have called ‘the Christian mythology’. On the other hand most of the authors who might be claimed as predecessors of modern enlightenment seemed to me very small beer and bored me cruelly. [8]

Similarly, just before he begins an argument that those elements of the Anglican church under the Stuarts that were sometimes mistaken for ‘Romish and papistic’ were rather ‘patristic’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge says of Herbert:

G. Herbert is a true poet, but a poet sui generis, the merits of whose poems will never be felt without a sympathy with the mind and character of the man. To appreciate this volume, it is not enough that the reader possesses a cultivated judgment, classical taste, or even poetic sensibility, unless he be likewise a Christian, and both a zealous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotional Christian. But even this will not quite suffice. He must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and from habit, conviction, and a constitutional predisposition to ceremoniousness, in piety as in manners, find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality; for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves. [9]

The context of Coleridge’s comment brings me to one aspect of Herbert that is particularly likely to appeal to Orthodox Christians: his devotion to the Fathers. Archbishop Chrysostomos refers to ‘a Patristic profundity to the insights and experiences of his soul’. [10] Herbert himself recommends to the country parson the study of the Fathers as essential to the understanding of Scripture:

As he doth not so study others, as to neglect the grace of God in himself, and what the Holy Spirit teacheth him; so doth he assure himself, that God in all ages hath had his Servants, to whom he hath revealed his Truth, as well as to him; and that as one Country doth not bear all things, that there may be a Commerce; so neither hath God opened, or will open all to one, that there may be a traffic in knowledge between the servants of God, for the planting both of love and humility. [11]

Robert Willmott quotes a remark of Herbert’s first editor, Barnabas Oley, ‘He that reads Mr Herbert’s poems attendingly, shall find the excellence of Scripture Divinity, and choice passages of the Fathers bound up in the metre.’ Willmott then comments:

Herbert did not forget to consult, for his outpourings of heart-praise and love, that commonplace book of Greek and Latin theology which the Country Parson is recommended to collect and ponder. Many of his curiosities of fancy have a Patristic, rather than a poetic ancestry, and are to be sought in Chrysostom or Cyprian, instead of in Donne, or Marini. [12]

Willmott is referring, of course, to the next chapter of Country Parson, where Herbert insists:

The Country Parson hath read the Fathers also, and the Schoolmen, and the later Writers, or a good proportion of all, out of all of which he hath compiled a Book and Body of Divinity, which is the storehouse of his Sermons, and which he preacheth all his Life; but diversely clothed, illustrated, and enlarged. [13]

In light of Coleridge’s and Willmott’s observations, I can’t help but wonder at the frequent and superfluous references to Herbert’s Protestantism in what is otherwise one of my favourite articles on Herbert: ‘“Brittle Crazy Glass”: George Herbert’s Devotional Poetics’, by an acquaintance who taught at my alma mater in my undergraduate days, Mark A. Eaton, now of Azusa Pacific University:

To a Protestant poet like Herbert, the very activity of writing poetry entails a self-assertion authorized only insofar as it succeeds in directing our gaze past the poetry toward God.

. . . Of course, Protestant exegesis of Scripture provided a simple interpretive procedure: God could be found behind every text, when read properly. [14]

The obvious place for a Protestant Christian to search for God is in the Bible. More often than not, biblical exegesis as it appears in Herbert’s poetry is typological. Reformation typology evolves from medieval exegesis and looks back across the centuries to St Augustine. [15]

[And quoting Barbara Lewalski,] . . . ‘typology permitted Protestants to identify their own spiritual experience much more closely with that of the Old Testament types. [16]

In short, I see nothing specifically Protestant in any of this. As Coleridge notes, it is patristic, and while English Protestants may have attempted a fidelity to the Fathers in the seventeenth century, they certainly did not continue such an attempt consistently, nor did the early Reformers themselves. Fr Andrew Louth reminds us, ‘Luther . . . was fundamentally and deeply opposed to allegory and to the concomitant idea of the multiple senses of Scripture . . . (not that this prevented Luther from having resort to allegory on other occasions).’ Fr Louth goes on to quote John Keble’s observation, ‘During the struggle of the Reformation, men had felt instinctively, if they did not clearly see, that the Fathers were against them’. [17]

Herbert even goes against the Protestant grain in his admiration for asceticism. L.R. Lind considers him exemplary of ‘a return to asceticism’ which ‘characterized some of the best English poetry’ of the time. [18] This is illustrated beautifully by Herbert’s encomium on Egyptian monasticism in these lines of ‘The Church Militant’, quoted by Coleridge as evidence of his veneration of the Fathers:

To Egypt first she came, where they did prove
Wonders of anger once, but now of love.
The ten Commandments there did flourish more
Than the ten bitter plagues had done before.
Holy Macarius and great Anthonie
Made Pharaoh Moses, changing th’ historie.
Goshen was darknesse, Egypt full of lights,
Nilus for monsters brouth forth Israelites.
Such power hath mightie Baptism to produce,
For things misshapen, things of highest use. [19]

It is interesting indeed that Herbert, when naming the ‘lights’ that shown forth from Egypt, chooses the desert ascetics, Ss Macarius and Anthony, rather than the great Doctors of the Church, Ss Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria.

But one thing that interests me in Herbert above all is what Ann Pasternak Slater calls his ‘abiding theme’: ‘that man’s soul is God’s temple’. [20] It may sound at first like a simple commonplace—we are all familiar with St Paul’s question in I Corinthians, ‘What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own’ (I Cor. 6:19)? But the Fathers discovered in this verse a very profound mystical doctrine, one which informed their reading of Scripture, their experience of liturgy, and their practice of prayer. Consider this passage from the Mystagogy of the Church of St Maximus the Confessor: ‘And again from another point of view he used to say that holy Church is like a man because for the soul it has a sanctuary, for mind it has the divine altar, and for body it has the nave.’ [21] Then compare the analogous interiorisation of the altar in Herbert’s poem (I apologise that I do not know how to reproduce the deliberate ‘altar’ shape of the lines in the printed texts—see the image to the left):

The Altar

A broken Altar, Lord, thy servant reares,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares: [22]
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch’d the same.
A heart alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy name:
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed Sacrifice be mine,
And sanctifie this Altar to be thine. [23]

Mary Ellen Rickey argues persuasively that the poem is a sanctification of a classical pattern, but at any rate the echo of a patristic theme only confirms her judgement that it is certainly ‘no mere quaint vagary of a naïve sensibility, as for two centuries it was mistakenly thought to be, or even an eccentricity redeemed by its skillful combination of Biblical allusions’. [24]

I have said or quoted a great deal about Herbert, but offered very little by way of his own words. I refer readers to a number of previous posts, here (where I also mention the study of Herbert by the late Mother Thekla of the former Dormition Monastery in Whitby, Yorkshire), here, here, here, and here. But I shan’t miss the opportunity to post just two more.

First, Michael Ward suggests that Lewis’s depiction of the descent of the planetary gods in That Hideous Strength may have been influenced by the following lyric of Herbert’s, where the line ‘The starres were coming down to know / If they might mend their wages, and serve here’ is underlined in Lewis’s copy at the Wade Center: [25]

Whitsunday

Listen sweet Dove unto my song,
And spread thy golden wings in me;
Hatching my tender heart so long,
Till it get wing, and flie away with thee.

Where is that fire which once descended
On thy Apostles? thou didst then
Keep open house, richly attended,
Feasting all comers by twelve chosen men.

Such glorious gifts thou didst bestow,
That th’ earth did like a heav’n appeare;
The starres were coming down to know
If they might mend their wages, and serve here.

The sunne, which once did shine alone,
Hung down his head, and wisht for night,
When he beheld twelve sunnes for one
Going about the world, and giving light.

But since those pipes of gold, which brought
That cordiall water to our ground,
Were cut and martyr’d by the fault
Of those, who did themselves through their side wound,

Thou shutt’st the doore, and keep’st within;
Scarce a good joy creeps through the chink:
And if the braves of conqu’ring sinne
Did not excite thee, we should wholly sink.

Lord, though we change, thou art the same;
The same sweet God of love and light:
Restore this day, for thy great name,
Unto his ancient and miraculous right. [26]

The other poem—‘The Windows’—is partially quoted by Archbishop Chrysostomos, in his enthusiastic review of Jane Falloon’s Heart in Pilgrimage: A Study of George Herbert. [27] It is also a major subject of Dr Eaton’s article. Slater takes the window to be the minister’s preaching, [28] but Eaton astutely goes a bit further, seeing in it an unmistakable reference to Herbert’s own poetry. [29]

The Windows

Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word?
He is a brittle crazie glasse:
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie,
Making thy life to shine within
The holy Preachers, then the light and glorie
More rev'rend grows, and more doth win;
Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and aw: but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the eare, not conscience ring. [30]

In conclusion, I highly recommend Felix Culpa’s meditation on ‘Church-monuments’ (here). But there are also many other good sources on Herbert online, including the Herbert page at the Luminarium (here), the Cambridge Author page (here), and a dissertation—‘The Dwelling Place of God: The Significance of Structure in “The Temple” by Lillian Myers (here). By all means, read more of and about this brilliant and pious man who ‘occupies a permanent and central position in our understanding of the development of English poetry and is recognized as one of the chief poets of the seventeenth century’. [31]


[1] Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna, Review of Heart in Pilgrimage: A Study of George Herbert by Jane Falloon, Orthodox Tradition XXVI.3, 2009, p. 58.

[2] Alexander M. Witherspoon & Frank J. Warnke, eds., Seventeenth-Century Prose & Poetry, 2nd ed. (NY: Harcourt, 1963), p. 842.

[3] Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (Vancouver: Regent, 2002), p. 195.

[4] Dame Helen Gardner, ed., The Metaphysical Poets (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 313.

[5] Isaac Walton, ‘The Life of Mr George Herbert’, The Complete English Works, by George Herbert, ed. Ann Pasternak Slater (NY: Knopf, 1995), p. 346.

[6] Ibid., p. 340.

[7] Ibid., p. 344.

[8] From Surprised by Joy, qtd. in Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life & Imagination of C.S. Lewis (SF: Harper, 2005), p. 126.

[9] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes & Lectures on Shakespeare & Some of the Old Poets & Dramatists, Vol. 2, ed. Mrs H.N. Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1849), p. 255.

[10] Archbishop Chrysostomos, p. 58.

[11] George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert in Prose & Verse, ed. Robert Aris Willmott (NY: D. Appleton & Co., 1857), p. 223.

[12] Robert Aris Willmott, ‘Introduction’, Herbert, p. xxii.

[13] Herbert, p. 224.

[14] Mark A. Eaton, ‘“Brittle Crazy Glass”: George Herbert’s Devotional Poetics’, Christianity & Literature 43.1, Autumn 1993, p. 6.

[15] Ibid., p. 7.

[16] Ibid., p. 9.

[17] Fr Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Wichita, KS: Eighth Day, 2007), p. 98.

[18] L.R. Lind, ed., Latin Poetry in Verse Translation (Boston: Houghton, 1957), p. 393.

[19] Herbert, p. 203.

[20] Ann Pasternak Slater, Introduction, The Complete English Works, p. xv.

[21] St Maximus the Confessor, Selected Writings, tr. George C. Berthold (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1985), pp. 189-90.

[22] Although Herbert refers to the ‘heart’ where St Maximus has ‘mind’ (nous), recall Columba Stewart’s observations that in the ‘Evagrian’ tradition these two faculties are often directly identified, and are at any rate closely related in the patristic tradition as a whole. See Columba Stewart, OSB, Cassian the Monk (Oxford: Oxford U, 1998), pp. 42 & 166, n. 13.

[23] Herbert, p. 18.

[24] Mary Ellen Rickey, Utmost Art: Complexity in the Verse of George Herbert (Lexington: U of Kentecky, 1966), p. 15.

[25] Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford U, 2008), p. 37.

[26] Herbert, pp. 54-5.

[27] Archbishop Chrysostomos, p. 58.

[28] Slater, p. xii.

[29] Eaton, p. 6.

[30] Herbert, p. 63.

[31] John R. Roberts, George Herbert: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1905-1974 (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri, 1978), p. x.

15 April 2010

Literature & Moral Philosophy—Henry James


Well, I’ve gone and missed a writer that I really wanted to post on. William Wordsworth’s birthday was last Wednesday, and aside from the fact that last week was far too busy to do anything remotely appropriate for him, Wordsworth Day coincides with the Feast of the Annunciation on the Church’s calendar. The latter was not only easier but more important to post on.

Today, I shall attempt to post on a writer about whom I actually know very little—Henry James (1843-1916). I have not actually read any of James’s fiction through, with the exception of his ‘ghost story’, The Turn of the Screw, but I have encountered his name in a couple of interesting places, and that is what decided me on doing this post. So, first, here is a somewhat edited version of the quite lengthy article on James in Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, 3rd ed.:

James, Henry, [Jr.] (1843-1916) American novelist, short-story writer, and critic. A major figure in the history of the novel, James is celebrated as a master craftsman who brought great art and fine perception to bear in the development of his abiding themes: the relationship between innocence and experience, especially as exemplified by the differences between the exuberant but uncultured Americans and the highly cultivated Europeans whose civilization was on the decline; the dilemma of the artist in an alien society; and the achievement of self-knowledge. . . .

James came froma distinguished family: his grandfather was one of the first millionaires in America; his father, Henry James, Sr. a noted philosopher and theologian who became a Swedenborgian . . . ; his brother, the eminent and original psychologist William James. Thus, the novelist grew up in an atmosphere that encouraged his becoming what he thought all novelists should be: ‘one on whom nothing is lost’.

James entered Harvard Law School in 1862 but withdrew at the end of a year, determined instead to write. In 1864 his first story, ‘A Tragedy of Error’, appeared in the North American Review. He soon caught the attention of William Dean Howells who, as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, helped and encouraged him; in 1871 his first novel, Watch and Ward, was published serially in the Atlantic. . . . In 1869 he made his first independent trip to Europe as an adult (the James children had attended several European schools). This trip marked the beginning of Henry James’s fascination with the theme of the American in Europe. During his second trip (1872-74), he wrote his best story to date: ‘A Madonna of the Future’, the story of an artist who never manages to paint the perfect madonna. In 1875, after much thought, he decided to make his home abroad. He went first to Paris—where he knew Maupassant, Flaubert, and Turgenev [1]—and in 1876 he settled in England. The 1870s saw the first real blossoming of James’s talent. . . . The major theme throughout his work—the confrontation of European and American civilizations—is posed unambiguously at this stage: Christopher Newman in The American is a naïve innocent as he comes into contact with the sophisticated and evil DeBellegardes. In his later work, James was to see his theme in a more complex light: the innocently unaware may themselves be the cause of evil in others.

. . . The climax of this period is The Portrait of a Lady, considered by many to be not only James’s finest but also one of the finest novels in English. . . .

In The Tragic Muse (1890), the intricate prose subsequently associated with James made its first impact. An interesting study of an actress, it preludes James’s excursion into playwriting in the 1890s. The plays were all more or less unsuccessful, but the effect of them on his fiction was marked and decisive. His stories and novels of the 1890s show a radical concern with experiment, maturing his characteristic late style of involved sentences in which every thought and image is qualified, each sentence in itself presented as a work of art. . . .

Soon after the turn of the century, James entered into his last and most fruitful period, publishing in rapid succession three long and complex novels, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. Difficult as many have found them, they mark the pinnacle of James’s art. . . .

In 1904 James visited the US and toured the country, producing on his return to England a travel book, The American Scene (1907). The major effort of these years, however, went into the task of writing the critical prefaces and, where needed, the revisions for the reissue of his works in the New York edition (1907-9), a venture that ultimately ran to twenty-six volumes. The prefaces, important comments on his work and craft, were later republished as The Art of the Novel (1934; ed. R.P. Blackmur). . . . Two novels were left incomplete at his death, in 1916, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, both published in 1917. James became a British subject in 1915, as a measure of support for the British cause in World War I. More than a half century later, in 1976, he was one of a handful of Americans to be immortalized in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. James’s letters [2] were edited and published (3 vols, 1974-80) by his biographer, Leon Edel. [3]

The sole work of James’s that I have actually read, The Turn of the Screw, is purportedly a ghost story about a governess of two orphans at a country manor who believes the children are being haunted by the ghosts of their previous governess and their uncle’s valet, a pair of libertine lovers believed to have been a negative influence on the children. Despite the governess’s efforts to ‘save’ them, the novel ends with the little girl in a delirium and her older brother dead.

Not long ago, I saw the 1961 film adaptation, The Innocents, co-written by William Archibald, Truman Capote, and John Mortimer. Suffice to say, I was quite disturbed by much of the strongly implied subtext in the film and, my curiosity aroused, acquired the Norton Critical Edition of the book. Although I don’t know whether some of the more disturbing parts of the adaptation were at all in line with James’s own intentions, some of the essays in the book convinced me that they need not be in order for an astonishingly amount of the story to be persuasively psychologised. In particular, Harold Goddard’s essay, ‘A Pre-Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw’, has made up my mind that the ‘ghosts’ of the story exist entirely in the mind of the governess. [4] According to Goddard, G.K. Chesterton, assuming that they were real and that the story was therefore ‘one of almost unmitigated horror’, had doubts ‘as to whether the thing ought ever to have been published’ (one wonders what GKC would have said of H.P. Lovecraft!). [5] But if it really is ‘all in her head’, the tale is no less haunting for that.

My first acquaintance with James, however, came much less directly, when in college I read Edith Wyschogrod’s fascinating Saints & Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy. The synopsis on the back cover actually refers tantalisingly to ‘the hagiographic fiction of Henry James’, and we find out within that it appears ‘straightforwardly to endorse altruism’. [6] James’s novel, The Wings of a Dove, a product of ‘his last and most fruitful period’, [7] is a major focus of Chapter 2 of Wyschogrod’s book, ‘Saintly Influence’. In this chapter, Wyschogrod writes, the novel ‘is treated as hagiographic fiction that illustrates the influence of altruistic action on moral self-interpretation and practice’, [8] and she notes later that it ‘lends itself to hagiographic recasting . . . [which] brings out interactions of saint and cynic as well as relationships of the text to its addressees. James’s work has the additional advantage of depicting the efficacy of exemplary action even after the death of its altruistic protagonist.’ [9] Wyschogrod then offers a ‘hagiographic skeletalization’ of the novel:

Kate is a young Englishwoman without fortune. Lest she be compelled to live in the style of her semidestitute father and sister, she prefers to accept the charity of an overbearing aunt. She has fallen in love with Densher, an English journalist who, like herself, also lacks means. The two are secretly engaged but choose not to marry against the wishes of Kate’s wealthy aunt, who prefers a more advantageous marriage. By secrecy and delay, Kate plans to bring the aunt round so that if Kate and Densher are careful they may ‘do all’: both marry and acquire wealth. Millie is a young American woman in possession of a vast fortune who has met Densher in New York, comes to London, and falls in love with him. In love also with life, Millie learns she will die of an unspecified malady. Outwardly calm and accepting, inwardly ‘she is like a creature dragged shrieking to the guillotine.’ Kate, who guesses her despair, prevents Densher from letting Millie know she and Densher are engaged. Instead, Kate urges Densher to toy with Millie’s affections in order later to inherit her fortune. Densher pities Millie, but ‘makes up’ to her. Lord Mark, a penniless peer and Kate’s former suitor, opens Millie’s eyes to this situation, but Millie stubbornly clings to her passion. The girl dies leaving Densher her fortune. Now Densher is able to measure the depth of Millie’s devotion. He agrees to marry Kate on condition that they renounce the money or, if Kate should reject these terms, that he himself renounce Millie’s wealth and make over the money to Kate. Kate refuses to marry on Densher’s condition. What is more, her ties to her old suitor, Lord Mark, have not been cleanly severed, suggesting possible further treachery, perhaps marriage to Lord Mark, thereby breaking faith with both Millie and Densher. Kate sees that Millie’s memory is now Densher’s love. The dove ‘stretched out her wings’ to cover them so that they shall never be as they were. [10]

Thus, of course, Millie is the ‘saint’, who transforms Densher ‘by an appeal neither to rational norms nor to a taken-for-granted moral ethos’, but by what Wyschogrod calls ‘saintly influence’. [11] She notes:

Densher’s transfiguration occurs when the interplay of cynical reason and saintly generosity becomes transparent. Self-sacrifice (and, in many traditional hagiographies, self-mortification) is a mode in which the hagiographic optative regularly expresses itself. Millie bequeaths not only her fortune but, on Kate’s interpretation, her life as well: ‘She gave up her life that you might understand her,’ Kate tells Densher. [12]

Wyschogrod, ‘leaning on an analogy of Wittgenstein’s’, suggests that ‘seeing the meaning of saintly work is less like grasping an argument and more like understanding a musical theme.’ [13] Of course, the analogy breaks down. Wyschogrod notes that ‘in the case of moral acts, appreciation need neither prompt nor reinforce moral action. In hagiographic discourse immoral acts are all the more striking not when moral insight is absent but when it is present but fails to generate moral actions.’ [14] This is what is so astonishing about Kate, who understands the significance of what Millie has done sooner that Densher does.

While Wyschogrod insists that she is not arguing ‘that the gift of great wealth to secure the private happiness of a few is equivalent to the self-sacrificial altruism stipulated earlier as a requirement of sainthood’ (one wonders what St Basil, or, more to the point, Fr Paul Schroeder, would say about Millie’s actions!), I think she is correct when she claims, ‘What hagiographic skeletalization highlights is the mechanism of saintly action and the strategies for uncovering it.’ [15] This is what I find so interesting about Wyschogrod’s work.

The other use of Henry James that interests me is also a philosophical study: Martha Nussbaum’s daunting Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy & Literature. Although I’ve read very little of this book as of yet, it is clearly shot through with Henry James. Two chapters feature references to James’s works in the titles—‘Chapter 4: Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl & Literature as Moral Philosophy’ and ‘Chapter 7: The Princess Casamassima & the Political Imagination’, and references to James take up almost an entire column in the index. Only a few pages in, Nussbaum refers to some of James’s ‘prefaces’ (referred to in the Benét’s entry above) where the author describes a writer’s ‘selection of appropriate terms and sentences, using two metaphors’—‘of plant growth’ and of ‘some creatures of the air, perhaps birds, perhaps angels’. I won’t go into the details of explaining the metaphors, but suffice to say, according to Nussbaum:

These two metaphors point to two claims about the writer’s art that seem worth investigating. To investigate and defend them is a central purpose of these essays. The first is the claim that there is, with respect to any text carefully written and fully imagined, an organic connection between its form and its content. . . . [16]

The second claim is that certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist. . . . [17]

Both claims are of course highly relevant to my own interests in both moral theology and in literature. They deserve a post of their own. But it is interesting to see for now that Nussbaum finds them in Henry James.

In conclusion, one wonders where Wyschogrod’s and Nussbaum’s readings would fit onto the trajectory described by Horace Gregory over fifty years ago, when he said that ‘James had gone through three separate stages of interpretation: first, as a psychological novelist, then, as a critic of society, and, third, as a moralist, scrupulous in his attention to Christian ethics.’ [18]


[1] Of Turgenev, James writes, ‘There is perhaps no novelist of alien race who more naturally than Ivan Turgénieff inherits a niche in a Library for English readers [referring to the Library of the World’s Best Literature, ed. Charles Dudley Warner (NY: International Society, 1897)]’ (Henry James, ‘Ivan Turgénieff (1818-1883)’, Russian Literature & Modern English Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Donald Davie (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1965), p. 47).

[2] After completing the first volume of James’s Letters, C.S. Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves, ‘I’m afraid he was a dreadful Prig, but he is by no means a bore and has lots of interesting things to say about books’ (They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 1914-1963, ed. Walter Hooper [NY: Macmillan, 1979], p. 524).

[3] Katherine Baker Siepmann, ed., Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. (NY: HarperCollins, 1987), p. 494-6.

[4] Harold C. Goddard, ‘A Pre-Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw’, The Turn of the Screw (A Norton Critical Edition), by Henry James, ed. Robert Kimbrough (NY: Norton, 1966), pp. 181-209.

[5] Ibid., p. 185.

[6] Edith Wyschogrod, Saints & Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1990), p. 219.

[7] Ibid., p. 495.

[8] Ibid., p. 33.

[9] Ibid., p. 43.

[10] Ibid., pp. 43-4.

[11] Ibid., p. 44.

[12] Ibid., p. 46.

[13] Ibid., p. 47.

[14] Ibid., p. 48.

[15] Ibid., p. 48.

[16] Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy & Literature (NY: Oxford U, 1992), p. 4.

[17] Ibid., p. 5.

[18] Horace Gregory, ‘Mutations of Belief in the Contemporary Novel’, Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature, ed. Stanley Romaine Hopper (NY: Harper, 1957), p. 42.