What Aristotle Papanikolaou Gets Wrong About Theosis and Liberal Democracy

A review of "The Mystical as Political" by Aristotle Papanikolaou

[Photo Credit: By Boris Sakic - Own work]

I. Introduction 

One of the central questions of Christianity is how Christians themselves relate to the ‘order of things’ as it exists out in the world. Even though Jesus Christ did not articulate any particular form of politics, His followers did indeed intuit that following His teachings nevertheless had strong implications for how they engaged with structures, in particular, of the Roman state and of the Second Temple religion. For modern believers, the public space that had once been dominated by the institutions and values of the Roman Empire and the Second Temple is now dominated by the institutions and values of “the market,” “democracy,” “human rights” and, more recently, the “rules-based order.” 

How must a Christian relate to these contemporary institutions and values? This is the central question of modern political theology, and this central question becomes ever more pressing as that same “rules-based order” comes into escalating degrees of conflict with other modes of order. Aristotle Papanikolaou’s book The Mystical as Political aims to provide a certain answer, and that answer is straightforwardly one which affirms the U.S.-led “rules-based order.” At several points he indicates the direction indicated for the Roman Catholic Church in America by John Courtney Murray, SJ, as the preferred analogy for the direction he wants Orthodoxy to go.¹ The central conceit of his book is that the principle of theōsis, that is to say divine-human communion, necessitates a structuring of social space that is liberal and democratic.²

The vision that Papanikolaou puts forward, of the political realm as a desert and political engagement as a form of ascesis within which Christians are called to actively love their neighbours by listening to them and engaging with them in reasoned dialogue, as opposed to dominating or bullying them, is a remarkably attractive one. There is much here that rings true as a challenge to laymen from within the Orthodox tradition to engage with the culture and the “world.” Papanikolaou is clearly at his best when making his heartfelt plea for a disciplined politics of ascesis.

That said, this reviewer can’t help but find this plea in some measure ironic. Papanikolaou’s vision of cultural engagement is certainly deserving of endorsement, but he has made little effort himself to listen to or engage in constructive dialogue, either with the people he critiques or with the sources he calls upon for ideological support. Even the targets of his criticism – to wit, Milbank, Cavanaugh, Hauerwas, Guroian and Yannaras – would likely agree with Papanikolaou’s articulation of both the character and the necessity of the virtues and habits he associates with a liberal-democratic context: for example, Milbank’s spirited defence of the political virtues of liberality.³

The trajectory from his attractive vision of political ascesis in the world to liberal democracy is also far from clear. There are and should be significant caveats to conscripting Vladimir Solovyov and Sergei Bulgakov to provide the strong positive commitment to liberal democratic political forms that Papanikolaou believes necessary. Furthermore, much of his argumentation here involves a substantial degree of equivocation between liberal democracy conceived as a value-neutral “political space that structures relations… that realize the inviolable uniqueness of all human beings”, and as a value-charged “particular notion of the common good including freedom, equality, justice, fairness, inclusivity, participation, diversity, and otherness”⁴, which excludes economy from consideration. Because of these weaknesses, Papanikolaou’s final broadside against “radical Orthodox” political theology lacks force, it lacks the necessary logical charity due to the “radical Orthodox” position, and it lacks the personal humility and willingness to listen which he himself claims are indispensable elements of political ascesis.

II. Political theology as history – Solovyov and Bulgakov

All political theologies are, in some degree, histories. At the basis of Papanikolaou’s assertion of a liberal-democratic political theology is a historiography of the Orthodox Church which attempts to centre divine-human communion as the indispensable political-theological principle. In this attempt, Papanikolaou traces the development of political theology from Eusebius and the Cappadocian Fathers (particularly Chrysostom), through Justinian, to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. After this, Papanikolaou posits, there was a split. The political crises of the Orthodox world – and in particular the creation of a Russian Empire and the Petrine subordination of the Russian Church to the state – created two directions for Orthodox thought. One of those directions, signalled by the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and further developed by his disciple, the émigré priest Sergei Bulgakov, is one which recentres theōsis as the central organising principle of political theology, and opens Orthodox theology to liberal democracy as an ideal.⁵ Papanikolaou rightly doesn’t expend much energy engaging Orthodox political thought within the ambit of Communist oppression because there isn’t much there, but within those Orthodox polities which escaped the Communist yoke, Papanikolaou singles out the Armenian-American academic Vigen Guroian and the Greek theologian Christos Yannaras as the primary Orthodox voices critical of liberal democracy.⁶

Papanikolaou argues that the Orthodox churches around the world face a choice in how they orient their political theologies. That choice is either: “an openness to a variety of forms of government so long as it prioritises the Orthodox Christian faith toward a predominantly Orthodox Christian culture,” or “an affirmation of a liberal democratic form of government, in which church-state separation is seen as a liberation for the church.”⁷ There are two possible ways to orient oneself politically to the principle of divine-human communion. So: which is it to be – the cultural Christendom of Guroian and Yannaras, or the sophianic liberal democracy of Solovyov and Bulgakov? 

I remain, however, unconvinced that Papanikolaou has done the necessary work of effectively understanding either Solovyov or Bulgakov as historians. There is indeed a sense in which Solovyov and Bulgakov’s thought does contain a political dimension, and this is the element with which Papanikolaou is primarily concerned. But because all political theologies are histories, as Papanikolaou implicitly acknowledges when setting out the history of Orthodox political thought which culminates in Solovyov’s and Bulgakov’s sophianic political vision, one must look askance when Papanikolaou attempts to dehistoricise liberal democratic political forms in ways which attempt to place them beyond the pale of historical critique. The fact that the weight of history weighs so heavily on the shoulders of these two thinkers, is perhaps one reason why both Solovyov and Bulgakov wind up, toward the end of their careers, revising many of their previous political commitments and positing views which are more modest in terms of their political prescriptions, but at the same time more sweeping in terms of their social import. 

Attempting to conscript Vladimir Solovyov on behalf of liberal democracy is particularly problematic, although misunderstanding Solovyov is unfortunately a perennial problem in English-language Orthodox literature. For example: even in his utopian phase Solovyov was not a socialist,⁸ but he explicitly and roundly condemned the idea of laisser-faire in economics,⁹ ruthlessly and caustically mocked classical liberal economists like Frédéric Bastiat,¹⁰ and defended in a limited way the moral posture of redistribution¹¹ and restrictions placed on economic activity by the state for the common good.¹² That has unfortunately not stopped the economic neoliberals of the Acton Institute from attempting to coopt Solovyov for their own purposes as some sort of apostle of free markets and liberalism writ large.¹³

Solovyov’s politics are likewise broadly misunderstood – precisely because he was concerned with the outworkings of the wisdom of God in history. His body of work ranged from an early idealism, through a mature preference for a “free theocratic” utopia, and finally to a distinctly anti-utopian vision haunted by apocalyptic premonitions. In none of his phases, however, does he express the sort of positive support for democratic political structures that Papanikolaou demands of modern Orthodox Christians. In the Justification of the Good, Solovyov has small use for democratic political institutions,¹⁴ and associates them with the mob, seeing the need to balance the outward guarantees of political freedom with the “inner conditions” and “moral consciousness” necessary to choose God and choose the good.¹⁵ Solovyov’s understanding of the nature of freedom clearly differs from Papanikolaou’s, to the point that he holds it to be the state’s role to “maximise the conditions for the possibility of a free response.”¹⁶

The reason for this is because Solovyov understands democratic politics as having been historically conditioned and circumscribed by the development of the pagan classical world.¹⁷ Indeed, in his penultimate work, War, Progress and the End of History, the abstract morals of democracy in a quasi-Tolstoyan form are placed in the mouth of the fictional Prince of his dialogue – whose views Solovyov ruthlessly demolishes. The late stage of parliamentary democracy in Western Europe, combined syncretically with forms of ascetic spirituality borrowed from India and China, is treated by Solovyov as one of the preconditions for the appearance of Antichrist at the end of history.¹⁸

The thought of Fr. Sergei Bulgakov must be conditioned by the exact same caveats as that of his mentor. Indeed, in the very same passages of The Orthodox Church to which Papanikolaou favourably alludes, Bulgakov states outright: “There is no dogmatic connexion between Orthodoxy and a predetermined political system. Orthodoxy is free and must not serve any political regime.” This is precisely the same position taken by the modern Russian Orthodox Church,¹⁹ a position which Papanikolaou criticises. Where Bulgakov approvingly cites the model of church-state separation found in the United States, it is explicitly in contrast with the militantly-atheist oppression of the Soviet state, and he immediately follows up with: “Doubtless this system is valid only provisionally, depending upon its historic usefulness.”²⁰ Within history, Bulgakov clearly believes that liberal democracy itself will wither under its own contradictions and give way to a “new Middle Ages.”²¹ Even as he quotes Bulgakov’s “Urgent Tasks” to this effect, Papanikolaou absolutises Bulgakov’s relative interest in the friendly church-state separation of the contemporary American political climate of the mid-1930s, and turns it into a principle which is “cosmic” in import rather than historical!²²

In doing so, Papanikolaou places himself squarely within the style of thought of the Russian intelligentsia whom Bulgakov critiques, with their “inadequate sense of historical reality, the geometric logic of its judgements and evaluations, and its notorious preoccupation with ‘principles’… which sometimes leads to ‘straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.’”²³ Bulgakov warns precisely against those intelligentsia who seek to graft the ripened branches of Enlightenment political thought – whether materialism, atheism, parliamentary democracy or communism – onto an Orthodox religious trunk, without regard for the intervening historical development.²⁴ The import of this essay, “Heroism and Asceticism,” in Bulgakov’s thought cannot be underestimated, since in it he reveals that he shares with the Russian intelligentsia their aversion to “bourgeois philistinism,” including the parliamentarian politics of the Western professional classes. But he asserts also that this quasi-religious and quasi-ascetic formation in the intelligentsia, which rejects the “bourgeois” forms in favour of materialism and mass politics, is in fact the result of a deformed Christian impulse, and that only through confession and repentance can it be healed. This essay thus also gives us some apophatic contours regarding Bulgakov’s Christian socialism. It is not a Leninist vanguard. Neither is it a revisionist or parliamentary social-democracy.

Had Papanikolaou approached the value of divine-human communion in the political thought of Solovyov and Bulgakov with a bit more humility, and tempered his understanding of political principles with the same historical judiciousness with which he set forth his account of Orthodox political thought from Eusebius up through the fall of Constantinople, his arguments may have been more convincing. One possible contextual treatment of Solovyov and Bulgakov, which places them in a history of Russian liberalism without misconstruing their actual, grounded political commitments, is Mikhail Sergeev’s essay on “Liberal Orthodoxy.” Although Solovyov and Bulgakov are both important antecedents, Sergeev does not see any unqualified support within Russian Orthodoxy for liberal democratic politics before Fr. Aleksandr Men.²⁵

III. A question regarding economic democracy

Papanikolaou is unfortunately quick to accuse critics of liberal democracy, such as Milbank, Cavanaugh and Guroian, of smuggling heretical, Gnostic assumptions about the nature of social reality into their critiques and positing a false “either/or” dichotomy between Christian and liberal democratic politics.²⁶ This is somewhat frustrating, as Papanikolaou himself occasionally poses something of a Manichean and Gnostic “either/or” himself, in the realm of secular politics, between liberal democracy and totalitarianism (whether communist or fascist)²⁷. Firstly, I would argue – following Orthodox academician Aleksandr Shchipkov – that the Arendtian-Popperian rhetorical tactic of lumping communism and fascism together under a single label has degenerated the term “totalitarian” into something of a thought-terminating cliché.²⁸ If we take seriously Papanikolaou’s analogy of political orders as necessarily imperfect icons of a more perfect mode of being-together in the kingdom to come – as I believe we should – then we should be naturally suspicious of such divisions of the social world into a realm of darkness and a realm of light. Secondly, this particular “either/or” actually closes off the horizon of inquiry into alternative structures and models which are neither liberal, nor totalitarian. 

One such model is that of economic democracy, which is not necessarily coterminous with liberal politics or parliamentary structures. This is not an escape into utopianism. A number of real-world examples, both historical and contemporary, of economic democracy exist. Some of them, such as the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain – and the broader phenomena of producer cooperatives generally – are allowed to exist in a limited way under liberal democratic polities, just as they were allowed to exist in Tsarist Russia. Indeed, the Slavophile philosophers held up the Russian mir or obshchina, the peasant commune which flourished in the lands surrounding Moscow in the sixteenth century, as a model of economic democracy containing elements of the Orthodox Christian labour truth.²⁹ Some interwar republican (and even Orthodox!) polities, such as Bulgaria under Aleksandăr Stamboliiski³⁰ and Romania under Ion Mihalache,³¹ actively promoted and supported rural economic democracy at the grassroots level – an experiment which was brutally terminated by a fascist onslaught from one side and a Soviet one from the other. Producer cooperatives also operate with direct state support in non- and post-Soviet market-socialist states such as China, Yugoslavia and Venezuela – Cornell professor Jaroslav Vaněk’s study on practices of worker self-management in producer cooperatives in Yugoslavia³² remains an authoritative source on both the theory and its application. The practice of worker self-management and workplace democracy has been supported consistently by a long line of economic theorists from Karl Polanyi to Gar Alperovitz and David Schweickart.

Papanikolaou, in fairness, does not object in principle to the idea of extending a discussion of divine-human communion to the economic sphere. Indeed, he states outright: “if divine-human communion is not limited to the individual mystical experience but has cosmic dimensions, then it must also inform Christian thinking of politics, culture, economics, and society.”³³ But it is astounding that, apart from a brief discussion on Bulgakov’s Christian socialist politics³⁴ and the occasional (afterthought?) support for passive guarantees to expand existing human rights discourse to include rights like food and shelter,³⁵ Papanikolaou has next to nothing to say about evaluating the iconic nature of economic orders in light of the ideal of divine-human communion. This is particularly surprising in light of his continued insistence that political systems are iconic representations of human relations in the Parousia, and therefore that liberal democracy ought to be preferred over all other systems.³⁶

But why should this be the case? Why should our focus on divine-human communion compel us to discern and promote political orders, but not economic ones? Papanikolaou says that it is incumbent on Orthodox believers to treat the political order as a desert within which we may learn to come face-to-face with, and embrace, the stranger.³⁷ But modern American political praxis, which in our present context is more consumer-oriented than producer-oriented and which is more likely to involve us in arguments online and on social media with people whom we’ll never meet face-to-face, is not exactly an arena which is well-suited to developing the sorts of virtues and habits that Papanikolaou rightly wants us to exercise. Indeed, practically nowhere does political action within a parliamentary framework provide most people in the society with the sort of sustained, face-to-face engagement with others that would help to build these kinds of habits.

Bulgakov says: 

Certainly the “conciliarity,” “sobornost’” of Orthodoxy is not democracy, but the absence of princes of the Church and of an ecclesiastical monarch—the Pope—makes it of the people, favourable to the spirit of economic democracy.³⁸

Papanikolaou himself asserts that “the kind of investment the listener has in the spoken truth depends on who the listener is to the truth-sayer.”³⁹ From statements such as these, it actually ought to be easier to make the case for a lay ascesis and a practice of love, forgiveness and truth-telling leading to theōsis in the very places where human beings most regularly, five days a week and eight hours a day, come face-to-face with both strangers and intimate acquaintances: in the workplace.⁴⁰ The sorts of workplaces in which intimate relationships, truth-telling and forgiveness become possible, are precisely the sorts of workplaces in which you aren’t able to be terminated on the whim of a middle manager or a human resources representative, at the mercy of doxxing mobs on Twitter for saying something “unwoke,” or subject to a contract that you have to accept or else starve to death. For many people, particularly on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, the form of our political system has little impact on how much actual freedom they are allowed to have. Their employers, not the government, act as the primary stifle on their spiritual well-being.

IV. Russian political theology, indigenous missiology and the case of the Evenkil

The Evenkil⁴¹ are an indigenous nation living in southeastern Siberia. They proudly formed a part of the Jurchen Jin state during the 1200s⁴² and the Qing Dynasty during the 1600s;⁴³ they live by trapping furs and herding reindeer on the marginal tundra. They live in tight-knit tribal units called urireng⁴⁴ (translated into Russian as obshchiny⁴⁵) and share their resources, tools and land communally. Their first contact with the eastward-expanding Russia was through the Cossacks who extracted taxes and fealty from them. They also traded goods with them – sometimes at unfair and exploitative prices – but otherwise largely left their social structures intact and did not attempt to violently subjugate or remove them.

In the wake of the Revolution, the Evenkil welcomed the Soviets who replaced the Cossacks. This was in part because, at first, they offered higher buying prices for pelts, and lower selling prices for things like ammunition, tea and sugar. When the Soviets explained communist ideology to them, the Evenkil largely took it to mean they would continue living as they had always done; they would just call themselves a “commune.”⁴⁶ However, the Second World War combined with the brutal Stalinist policies of forced sedentarisation, reduced the population of the Evenkil by over a third, from 38,800 to 24,200.⁴⁷ Continued bureaucratic rationalisation of Evenki land ownership broke apart the traditional communities even after the Stalinist period.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia became, overnight, a liberal and capitalist power, what few Evenkil were left were thrown into a free-for-all market scenario which even further dissolved their rights in their own land, impoverished them and destroyed their traditional economy. Even though they were granted rights to freedom of speech and assembly they had not enjoyed in Soviet times – both freedoms which they welcomed – it was no less difficult for them to negotiate, as urireng (community units), for the lands that had been and continued to be privatised and alienated from them, and sold off to corporations or individual landowners from elsewhere in the former Soviet states.⁴⁸ Evenki culture has continued to deteriorate and their population has not recovered to what it had been before sedentarisation.

Now, another of Papanikolaou’s stances which is in need of a certain degree of pushback, is his attempt to harmonise the inherently theistic, communal-personalist account of dignity articulated in an Orthodox setting by Vladimir Lossky, Christos Yannaras and John Zizioulas with a still-theistic but more individualist account of human rights articulated by Nicholas Wolterstorff.⁴⁹ Using the thought-experiments of an exposed infant, an Alzheimer’s patient and Jewish victims in Nazi concentration camps, Papanikolaou takes a position which agrees with the ecstatic-erotic and relational (with respect to God) account of personhood in Lossky, Yannaras and Zizioulas⁵⁰, but introduces a dimension of suspicion, apparently borrowed from Wolterstorff, against human communities and relationality, seeing in them a threat to personhood and a tendency towards de-personalisation.⁵¹ His critique against the Orthodox position of Guroian and Yannaras, and also particularly the Russian Orthodox Church, appears to rest upon a fear that human communities and institutions pose an ineradicable threat to human uniqueness and irreplaceability.⁵² Therefore it is not enough to be satisfied with a “thick” theistic account of human dignity. There must also be allowed space for rights-language to safeguard the inviolability and God-bestowed rights upon the individual.

There remains, however, the question of where this leaves human communities and institutions that are deprived of political power, like the Evenkil mentioned above. The insufficiency of human rights regimes relying on individualist logic, and the frankly atrocious track record of liberal democratic governments, in safeguarding the communal integrity, linguistic health and customs of indigenous communities in countries like Russia, Canada and the United States has been well observed. The OHCHR has even adopted a declaration in an attempt to safeguard the collective, cultural and linguistic rights of indigenous communities – significantly against encroachment by liberal democratic governments.⁵³

Here is where I begin to suspect that his criticisms of Russian Orthodox clergymen and Russian Orthodox social documents such as the Basis of the Social Concept document of 2000, are not only lacking in charity, but also unknowingly serving reactionary ends. The Russian Orthodox critique of individualistic human rights language, in favour of an ethic of human dignity which extends to community rights, is in fact motivated not by a self-serving desire to co-opt state power for itself, but to preserve the communal rights of the indigenous nations within Russia, as well as of Orthodox believers of the predominant Russian ethnicity. Many of these indigenous nations (like the Evenki, the Sakha and the Ket peoples of Siberia) are majority-Orthodox, though others (like the majority-Buddhist Tuva and Buryat, the majority-Islâmic Tatar, and the majority-shamanist Udeghe peoples) are not. 

The concern for indigenous communal integrity has been explicit from the early days of Russian Orthodox involvement on rights discourse in the wake of the Soviet collapse. One can see from the written work of people like Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk⁵⁴ – now Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ – that one of the key concerns was indeed the integrity and collective self-determination of minority peoples. At that time, Russia’s ethnic minorities were suffering both from economic exploitation by Western capital, with the connivance of the newly-liberalised Russian state, and from the erosion of their culture by Western Protestant missionaries.

Papanikolaou ignores the import of this dimension of Russian religious discourse, even though he explicitly alludes to it at one point.⁵⁵ In charity to him, this does not appear to originate from any antipathy to indigenous peoples or explicit desire for settler-colonialist erasure of such communities. Instead he ignores this concern on account of a hermeneutic of suspicion which he levels against the institutional Russian Church more generally. He does not allow the Russian Church to have any concerns beyond its own self-interest. He treats the gestures of the Russian Orthodox clerics to Muslims and other faith groups as essentially diplomatic fig-leaves over a project of attaining coercive institutional power within the Russian state.

The idea that one can save the individual from surrounding human communities and relationality is summed up precisely in Captain Richard Pratt’s credo: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”⁵⁶ Placing Indians in residential schools, forcing them to speak English, to dress in Western clothes, to embrace Protestantism and to think of themselves as  political citizens of a liberal-democratic polity – all this was indeed posited by residential schools like Captain Pratt’s Carlisle as an act of “friendship” for the Indian. This reviewer, however, sees the treatment of Indigenous communities as a deep tragedy. Indigenous communities are valuable in themselves, as life-worlds and as traditional cultures which reflect unique and irreplaceable modes of being human… which were and are under siege by the same politically-republican, Anglophone, capitalist civic monoculture which Papanikolaou defends.

I’m sure Papanikolaou would recognise the fact that residential schools also routinely violated what as the essential human rights of the Indians under their care, including the most basic forms of bodily integrity. Nevertheless, the project of the residential schools was precisely one which attempted to acculturate the Indian to a liberal democratic political culture, in the same way which Papanikolaou wishes to acculturate the Orthodox. The civilising mission, which is predicated on forging political loyalties to an order with its own internal logic of legitimation by stamping out other forms of linguistic and cultural belonging,⁵⁷ is nonetheless one which Papanikolaou implicitly agrees with when he says that Orthodox Christians are obliged to prefer liberal democratic systems above all other alternatives.

By contrast, the Russian Orthodox missionaries among indigenous peoples under the Tsars – such as Saint Tryphon of Pechenga,⁵⁸ Saint Innocent of Irkutsk⁵⁹ and Saint Herman of Alaska⁶⁰ – had absolutely no interest in “killing the Indian” to “save the man.” They were much more modest and indeed, much more truly ascetical, in their understanding of how to love their indigenous neighbours. They did not see it as their job to create citizens, much less Russian-speakers. That did not mean that they were politically inactive or apathetic when it came to safeguarding the dignity of the peoples among whom they lived: indeed, in Saint Herman’s complaints to the colonial investigators about the greedy, violent and rapacious treatment by Russian company men toward his Aleut neighbours, one notes a very real concern for their human dignity.⁶¹

But the political priority for these missionary saints is always one of transforming existing orders rather than replacing them. The result of these missionary efforts was, in at least one case, crystal-clear. After the American purchase of Alaska in the 1860s, when the Tlingit were offered the choice between an evangelical Presbyterianism which would actively turn them into English-speaking, politically republican Americans, or an Orthodoxy which would tacitly preserve their communal integrity, language and customs – they chose Orthodoxy.⁶²

V. Conclusion

The modern question of political theology appears, particularly in recent years following the events of 2016 in the United States and Britain, to be one of peculiar urgency. We are witnessing, in real time, the dissolution of certain core assumptions about the nature of political participation and about the world order which held prior to 2016. As such, anyone who seeks to go back to a book like Aristotle Papanikolaou’s The Mystical as Political from a current-day perspective has no choice but to navigate the questions that have arisen about some of its core conceits in the years since its publication. Many of the critiques of the way liberal democracy tends to function in reality, by postliberal theorists such as Hauerwas, Milbank and Guroian, have been very effectively borne out.

As Hauerwas put it in his 2007 article “America’s God”:

More Americans may go to church than their counterparts in Europe, but the churches to which they go do little to challenge the secular presumptions that form their lives or the lives of the churches to which they go. For the church is presumed to exist to reinforce the presumption that those who come to church have done so freely. The church’s primary function, therefore, is to legitimate and sustain the presumption that America represents what all people would want to be if they had the benefit of American education and money.⁶³

What is more, wars are a permanent necessity for America’s political order, Hauerwas holds. Within a secular body politic composed of individuals who have nothing in common other than the belief that death is to be avoided at all costs, only fear of the evil outsider can keep American society together.  Is it any wonder that America’s political leaders keep the U.S. in a constant state of war? 

It was not given to the desert ascetics to pretend they knew what the political state of humanity at the Parousia would look like, when the harvest would come, or what the final yield of such labours would be. Neither should we assume it to be the case with us. Creating places where truth can be told and forgiveness sought and given, discerning the times as far as we are able – these things are not only laudable, they are necessary. But in the present time in particular, a much greater degree of humility is required. This is not merely individual humility, but civilisational humility as well: the understanding that we have not reached the end, that we are not in the Promised Land, and that even in the desert we would be nowhere without the guiding pillar of cloud and of fire. The restraint of the Russian Orthodox Church’s social documents, and their reticence to endorse with finality any political system over another, may be frustrating to an American Orthodox Christian who wants to see vindication of his political a prioris, but in the end this restraint appears more consistent with the sophianic vision of Bulgakov – and in particular with the humility of that vision.

1.  Papanikolaou, Aristotle. The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2012, pg. 12 and pg. 55. Papanikolaou: ‘While I would never presume to equate myself to John Courtney Murray, I hope this book begins a conversation with John Courtney Murray-like results.’

2. Ibid., pg. 199.

3. Milbank, John. “Liberality versus liberalism,” in Telos: Critical theory of the contemporary 2006 (134): pp. 6-21.

4.  Papanikolaou, Mystical as Political, pg. 77.

5. Papanikolaou, Mystical as Political, pp. 32-43.

6. Ibid., pg. 46.

7. Ibid., pg. 53.

8. Solovyov, Vladimir. The Justification of the Good, trans. Natalie Duddington. London, UK: Constable & Company, Ltd., 1918, pp. 334-5.

9.  Ibid., pg. 328: “Free play of economic factors and laws is only possible in a community that is dead and is decomposing, while in a living community that has a future, economic elements are correlated with and determined by moral ends. To proclaim laissez faire, laissez passer is to say to society, ‘die and decompose.’”

10. Ibid., pp. 338-40.

11. Ibid., pp. 274-5.

12.  Ibid., pp. 379-80.

13. Acton Institute Staff. “Vladimir Solovyov, 1853-1900.” Religion and Liberty 21(4): Fall 2011, p. 14

14. Ibid., pg. 121. “No progress of democratic institutions would give an ass the capacity of enjoying Beethoven’s symphonies, or enable a pig, which cannot appreciate even the taste of oranges, to enjoy the sonnets of Dante or Petrarch or the poems of Shelley.”

15. Ibid., pp. 468-9.

16. Papanikolaou, Mystical as Political, pg. 35.

17. Solovyov, Justification, pg. 269.

18. Solovyov, Vladimir. War, Progress and the End of History, trans. Alexander Bakshy. Albany, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1990, e-book position 10.11.

19. The bulk of this article was written before the “special military operation” in the Ukraine which has been given a certain frisson of intellectual respectability by the Russian Orthodox Church. In the wake of that “operation,” this statement evidently now needs to be qualified. This action reinforces a fortiori the broader point, however: the Orthodox Church must not allow itself to be instrumentalised as the political tool of any temporal political regime or ideology.

20. Bulgakov, Sergei. The Orthodox Church. Syracuse, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988, pp. 162-3.

21. Ibid., pg. 194.

22. Papanikolaou, Mystical as Political, 38.

23. Bulgakov, Sergei. “Heroism and asceticism,” in Vekhi, trans. Marshall Shatz and Judith Zimmerman. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, Inc., 1994, pg. 29.

24.  Ibid., pg. 25.

25. Sergeev, Mikhail. “Liberal Orthodoxy: From Vladimir Solov’ev to Fr Aleksandr Men,” in Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe 2008(23): IV.ii.

26.  Papanikolaou, Mystical as Political, pp. 81, 145, 196, 199.

27. Ibid., 134.

28. Shchipkov, Aleksandr. “Binary theory of totalitarianism: validity limits,” in Traditionalism, Liberalism and Neo-Nazism in the Current Political Space. Moscow, RU: Self-published, 2016.

29. Christoff, Peter. An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism: Iu. F. Samarin. Oxford, UK: Westview Press, 1991, pp. 190-1.

30. Bell, John D. Peasants in Power: Alexander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, 1899-1923. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 66-72.

31. Berend, Ivan T. History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 277-8.

32. Vaněk, Jaroslav. The Participatory Economy: An Evolutionary Hypothesis and a Strategy for Development. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971.

33. Papanikolaou, Mystical as Political, pg. 70.

34. Ibid., pg. 39.

35.  Ibid., pg. 122.

36. Ibid., pg. 144.

37. Ibid., pg. 86.

38. Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, pg. 172.

39. Papanikolaou, Mystical as Political, pg. 168.

40. I realise that this is a changing reality which may already be gone as a result of the “gig economy” which is, if possible, even more alienating and degrading to the worker than the traditional nine-to-five blue-collar economy. Even so, the fact that for the vast majority of people, full-time forty-hour week employment is necessary to qualify for health insurance should be enough to demonstrate that this is still the expected norm of working-class life, at least on paper.

41. Historically – and wrongly – also “Tungus” (Тунгус). The terms “Solon” (Солоны, 索伦) and “Oroqen” (Орочоны, 鄂伦春) are designations of subgroups within the Evenki nation.

42. Pervyi Baikal’skii. “The Evenkis: the first people of Lake Baikal,” Key to Baikal, 25 December 2017. Accessed 21 July 2020 at https://1baikal.ru/en/istoriya/the-evenkis-the-first-people-of-lake-baikal.

43. Chi Zijian. The Last Quarter of the Moon, trans. Bruce Holmes. London, UK: Vintage Books, 2014, pg. 130.

44.  Ibid., pg. 4.

45. Fondahl, Gail. Gaining Ground? Evenkis, Land and Reform in Southeastern Siberia. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998, pp. 133-4. Significantly, this is indeed the same word that is used to render the traditional Russian commune or mir that was held up by the Slavophiles as an example of indigenous peasant socialism.

46.  Ibid., pp. 23-25.

47. Ibid., pp. 64-72, 136.

48. Ibid., pp. 84-86.

49. Papanikolaou, Mystical as Political, pp. 114-20.

50. Ibid., pp. 103-4.

51. Ibid., pp. 117-8. “The depersonalisation is not simply subjective, that is, from the perspective of the perpetrator of abandonment; the baby has been objectively depersonalised in the sense of being constituted in relations that render her nonunique, replaceable, with a forgettable narrative.”

52. Ibid., pg. 93 and pg. 124.

53. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples,” New York, NY: United Nations, 2007. https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/ipeoples/pages/declaration.aspx. N.B.: the four votes against this declaration came from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

54. Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad. “Gospel and Culture,” in Proselytism and Orthodoxy in Russia: the New War for Souls, eds. John Witte, Jr. and Michael Bourdeaux. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999, pg. 75. “Everyone who, armed with the Bible, sets off to enlighten peoples should remember that by the end of the twentieth century there are indigenous Christian churches virtually everywhere. Independent action taken by missionary groups at the expense of these churches represent an attempt to redraw the map of the world, and wherever they are taken there is always tension, alienation, bitterness.”

55. Papanikolaou, Mystical as Political, pp. 48-9.

56.  Pratt, Richard. “The advantages of mingling Indians with whites,” in Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/.

57. Pratt: “Theorizing citizenship into people is a slow operation. Neither can the Indians understand or use American citizenship theoretically taught to them on Indian reservations. They must get into the swim of American citizenship. They must feel the touch of it day after day, until they become saturated with the spirit of it, and thus become equal to it.”

58. Orthodox Church in America. “Venerable Tryphon, Abbot of Pechenga,” 15 December 2019. https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2019/12/15/103552-venerable-tryphon-abbot-of-pechenga.

59. Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Innocent, First Bishop of Irkutsk,” 26 November 1999. https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/1999/11/26/103399-repose-of-saint-innocent-first-bishop-of-irkutsk.

60.  Orthodox Church in America. “Glorification of Venerable Herman of Alaska, Wonderworker of All America,” 9 August 2016. https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2016/08/09/102241-glorification-of-venerable-herman-of-alaska-wonderworker-of-all.

61. Oleksa, Michael. Orthodox Alaska: a Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992, pp. 120-2.

62. Ibid., pp. 180-1.

63.  Hauerwas, Stanley. “America’s God.” Washington, DC: Communio: International Catholic Review (Fall 2007).