Since my daughter-in-law is Russian, and most of my immediate family is now Orthodox, I tend to look at anything having to do with Russia, and especially with my faith as it’s practiced in Russia.
Rod Dreher seems to feel the same way, for some of the same reasons, probably. But Thursday’s Putin’s Confessor And Subversive Orthodoxy took an unexpected turn from the already-improbable story of Abbot Tikhon Shevkunov, Putin’s rumored confessor:
Father Tikhon says what drew him to Christianity (aside from an attempt to avoid demonic possession) was that it became obvious to his generation that “all the great figures of the world and Russian history” – he mentions Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kant, Goethe and Newton, among others – “all those whom we trusted and loved and respected, all of them had thought about God in a completely different way from us.” On the other hand, “those who evoked no sympathy whatsoever” – Marx, Lenin, Trotsky – “all these destructive revolutionaries who led our state to what it had become, all were atheists.” The choice, he says, was clear.
That parallels Dreher’s own experience:
When I was an undergraduate, and wrestling with whether or not I believed in Christianity, and had Chartres, The Seven Storey Mountain, and Kierkegaard on my mind, it occurred to me one day — I remember exactly where I was when the thought struck me, standing in front of the LSU Student Union, under a crepe myrtle tree, on a warm day — that all the artists, writers, and philosophers I was coming to admire and to think had something important to say about life and how to live it were Christians. Isn’t that interesting? I thought. Till that point, I thought Christianity was simply the dull middle class at prayer, or something militantly anti-intellectual, like the Swaggartarian Bible-thumpers who preached in front of the Student Union.
I’m currently reading Beauty Will Save the World, by Gregory Wolfe, founder of Image:
When a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot says, “Beauty will save the world,” the hyperbole seems over the top. And yet there just may be something profoundly true about it. The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—as stern a moralist as the world is ever likely to witness—came to believe in the wisdom of Dostoevsky’s insight, as he argues in his acceptance address for the Nobel Prize in Literature …
[T]he implication that beauty alone could harbor such redemptive powers was unsettling, to say the least. It was the kind of idea one would expect of an Oscar Wilde or some other fin de siècle decadent ….
On the wall of my study as I type is a poster from Mars Hill Audio, which I’ve enjoyed for more than a decade now. The poster dates back to the days when it came on tape:
Tapes for people who believe that truth, goodness and beauty are still more important than race, class, and gender.
I’m starting to understand all that, which I think shares a common sensibility.
* * * * *
It wasn’t always so. I recall in my Senior year of high school (a boarding school identified as Evangelical, but it would not be far off the mark to call it fundamentalist) struggling mightily as a young English teacher, who seemed pretty cool but probably the most liberal on faculty, stretched me (if not others) to cease limiting truth to fact. He didn’t succeed, or if he did, it was only after long delay.
Non-factual truth seemed very wooly-headed and dangerous to me. I think that was kind of a concomitant of the kind of Evangelicalism I had been steeped in for the previous three years of boarding school (if not the previous seventeen years — the possibility of which is as harsh a thing as I ever intend to say about my parents’ role in my religious formation). My idea of good poetry – poetry being a particular reproach since it used words but wasn’t factual – for decades remained very, very limited to fun stuff like limerick and James Whitcomb Riley.
In college and post-college, the voices in my echo chamber talked much of “propositional truth,” and spoke as if that’s what – indeed, as if that’s all – the Bible is: propositional truths. I probably misunderstood, because the idea is absurd, and the writers who communicated that to me were not stupid. But they were, in retrospect, ideologues, and I may just have heard them right.
So much did I believe in discursive reason that when I discovered Calvinism and the earliest personal computers both between my 25th and 30th years, I thought that with some time, I could master Basic-language computer coding and write a decision tree program that through a series of questions would force any honest person to become a Calvinist, too. For instance,
“Will God punish the same sin twice?” Yes or No.
If “No,” then “Will God punish the sins of those who don’t believe in Jesus?” Yes or No.
If “Yes,” then Calvinist “limited atonement” is proven.
So I thought. So some still do.
In my 48th year, that sort of world came crashing down. It was a year of epiphanies that led me into Orthodox Christianity. But in the process, it “told me” in no uncertain terms that my discursive reason and my intent to master the propositional truths of the Bible had led me badly astray — had led me, I more gradually came to see, off into a kind of epistemic closure. Because I was coming from an ideologue position, my first faltering steps back toward reality themselves were fairly propositional. But beauty, especially the beauty of true worship (see this stark and somewhat tendentious comparison), played its role, too.
So whether or not, pace Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Gregory Wolfe, beauty will save the world, the apprehension of beauty as a marker of truth has saved more than a few perceptive souls, like Abbot Tikhon and Rod Dreher, and even touched me.
* * * * *
Meanwhile,
It is precisely … fear of the imagination that has led many Christians in America to create a subculture with Christian publishers, Christian record labels, and Christian art galleries. The underlying message conveyed by these products is that they are safe; they have the Christian seal of approval. But this is a devil’s bargain: in exchange for safety, these products have given up their imaginative power. And this is just where the strangest irony of all emerges. This subculture has rushed to produce Christian versions of almost every secular trend: from Christian heavy metal bands to Christian romance novels to Christian self-help books. But because these products lack the transforming power of the imagination, they are little better than the pop culture trends they imitate.
And, be it noted, lacking the transforming power of the imagination, they lack beauty. Even when I was an ideologue, my ideology had room to recognize how derivative and inferior such things were.
So in my seventh decade, I’m unsubscribing from plodding, unimaginative, ideological magazines and steeping in beauty – music, poetry, quiet analysis (instead of of shrill talking points) and the Orthodox Liturgy. Maybe beauty will save me yet.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 